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May, 1984 $2.95 



magazine 



The official publication for the world's largest international Commodore users group 



The magazine for C-64. 
VIC 20, PETandSuperPET 
users. 



Economic forecasting 
with your 8032. 



n 



Randy Robot — 

the robot with a VIC 20 heart! 



^v 



V 




^ ' 



VIC 20 word processor reviews 



fC1T7 & (C1T8 docomsntation 



'56698"72U5' 



05 



-.^: 




BUTTERFIELD 




TENIPIilON 







PAL 64 



|pcy>A/En64 




JT The futest and easrest co use 
t^ assembler for the Commodore 64T 
Paf 64 enaWes che user to perform 
assembly language program mmg using the 
standard H O S m nemo n ics . $49 * 9 5 * 

-^^^ POWER 64 

JT Is an absolutely indispsnsible aid to 
t^ the programmer using Commodore 
64 BASIC. Power 64 turboniharges 
resident BASIC with dozens of new stiper 
useful commands like MERGE. UNDO. 
TEST and DISK as well as all the old 
standbys such as RENUM and SEARCH & 
REPLACE, includes MorePower 64. 

S49,9S' 

^^^^ TOOL BOX M 

4F Is the ultimate pro|rafnmer'5 utility 
t V package. Includes Pal 64 assembler 
and Power 64 BASIC soup-up kit all 
together in one fully integrated and 
econom ic al pa c kage . S09 , 95 * 




f^ SPiLLPRO M 
"j^l Is an easy to use spelling checker 
Sir with a standard dictionary expandabte 
to 80.000 words. SpellPro 64 quickly 
adapts itself co your personal vocabulary 
and business jiirgon allowing you to add ami 
delete words toKrom the dictionary, edit 
documents to correct onrecogntzed words 
and output Itsts of unrecognised words to 
printer or screen. SpellPro 64 was designed 
to work with the WordPro Series and 
other wordprocessiog programs using the 
WordPro file format. $49,95" 

MAILPRO, SPEILPRO and PAL are 
available for Commodore 8032 computers 
equipped with either Commodore 4040 or 
BOSO Disk Drives, Further Information on 
request. 

Distributed in Oinada by: 

PACO ELECTRONICS LTD 
20 Steelcase Rd., West. Unit 10 
Markham. Ont., L3R IB2 
416-475^0740 Telex 06-9 6665 S 

U;S^ Dealer, Distributor inquiries invited, 

'Prices shown are in U.S- DollarSi slightly 
higher in Canada 

■f CorrMTodoii-Q 64 s^ Commodore trt 
t/^dcmarka of Commociorc BuiirwKt 




-^^ WORDPRO 64 

fF This brand new offering from the 
t % onginacors of the WordPro Series 
brings professional wordprocessing to che 
Commodore 64 for the first time. Two 
years under development. WordPro 64 
features 1 00% propgrtronal printing 
capability as well as 40/80 column display, 
automatic word wrap, columniration, 
alternate paging for headers St footers, four 
way scrolling, extra text area and a brand 
new 'OOPS' buffer chat magieaKy brings 
back text deleted In error All you ever 
dreamed of In a wordprocessor program, 
WordPro 64 sets a new high standard for 
the software industry to meet. $49.95 " 
-^^MAILPROM 
4F A new generation of data 
t V orpnizer and list manager, MailPro 
64 is the easiest of all to learn and use. 
Handles up to 2,000 records on oae disk, 
prints multiple labels across, does minor 
text editing ie: setting up invoices. Best of 
all, Hail Pro 64 resides entirely within 
memory so you don't have to constantly 
juggle disks like you must with other data 
base managers for the Commodore 64. 

S49.9S* 



5PaiPHD64 , MAILPR064 



j(4 1 6) 273-6350 

755 THE QUEENSWAY EAST. UNIT a, 
MlSStSSAUGA ONTARia CANADA. L4Y 4C5 



^IJ 



ADVENTURES in the LAND 
^ OF THE COMMODORE 64. ^ 



ur brave companions Mighty VICTREE, Speedy ARROW, Professor MIKRO 
I and his faithful dog ZOOM are off to help build a greatet, more glorious 
Commodore Kingdom. 

*'There, up ahead — I see it ! " exclaimecl the impetuous young Speedy Arrow. "Yes, I 
do too," said wise Professor MIKRO, as his dog ZOOM yipped happily. VICTREE 
squinted at the light shining in the distance. Earlier in the year, the Land of the Commo- 
dore 64 had asked for aid from the Wizard of Skyles Electric Works. The great Market- 
place Flood had temporarily hurt the Kingdom, and so the Wizard dispatched the four 
journeyers to help build a greater, more powerful monarchy. 

VICTREE, the scholarly youth trained by the wizard Skyles, finally spoke. "Speedy 
ARROW, what wiU you do when we arrive at the gates of Cassette Village?" 

"Oh boy, I can't wait," she said. "I never met a cassette I didn't like. You 
know how long it takes cassette programs to load, right? Well, I can make 
them load about eight times the normal speed." She cast the others a sly 
look. '1 just hope they can keep up with me. Because with my help, 
those programmers in Cassette Village wiU be able to store 200 
Kbytes of programs on a single C-20 tape." 

"That wiU help make Commodore Kingdorn one of the most 
powerful in the world," said Professor MIKRO. The professor 
accompanied the intrepid journeyers because of his vast knowl- 
edge oif machine language. "And I wiU help free the program- 
mers who are enslaved in the BASIC basement," he said. 
ZOOM barked. "Of course, ZOOM! You will add the 
powers of machine language manipulation with 23 editing 
commands and 11 disk commands. Fm not nearly as 
powerful without you," the Professor said. 

All the while, VICTREE wondered if he could fulfill 
his master Skyles' high expectations. "Only time wiU 
tell," he thought. 

Join us next time for the journeyers' encounters 
with the ethereal BLITZ! 





If you want to kiMiw more about these charactets and what they can 
do, caU Skyles Electric Works at (415) %5-m5, or toll-free 1-800- 
227-9998- Or you can write to the Wizard for a complete catalogue. 

Co) Sidles Electric Works 

J5 231-E S. Whisman Road 

^P Mountain ^Aew, California 94041 



m 



ARROW is a cartridge that helps cassette programs load 
much faster because it can re-record them at a much higher 
density. It saves tape, loading times, and has many extra fea- 
tures such as hex/decimal calculations and a machine lan- 
guage monitor. Available for the C-64 and VIC-20 at $49.95. 

VICTREE is the most convenient programmer's aid pack- 
age available in personal computers today. The cartridge 
has 42 commands for writing, editing and debugging pro- 
grams, and for allowing easier access to the disk operating 
system in the 1541 drive. For C-64 or VIC-20, $89.95. 

MIKRO is a machine language assembler that lets the user 
write more complex, faster, more powerful programs than 
simple BASIC does. The cartridge contains editing routines 
that create a source text with symbolic labels. Its advanced 
assembler then converts the source text into the final 
machine language instructions. MIKRO has bodi disk and 
editing commands. Just $79.95 for die C-64, $89.95 for 
the VIC-20. 

ZOOM, a companion product to MIKRO, is an extremely 
advanced machine language manipulator (monitor) with 
such editing and command functions as COMPARE, 
TRANSFER, QUICK TRACE, VERIFY, and DISASSEM- 
BLE. It also has 11 advanced disk commands. $24.95 in 
disk for the C-64 onlv. 



■ Who has the best system for me? 

■ Is there a specific system for my needs? 

■ Can a computer reduce my costs? ■ What's the 

value of a network s)'^tera? ■ Is it expandable? ■ What is 

the computer job market like? ■ How do I care for a computer? 

■ What makes Micro-computers unique? ■ Will it save me time? 

■ Do I have to learn to program? ■ What peripherals will I need? 

■ Can lusemy computerformorethanonetask?" Is it portable? 
I What about word processing? ■ Will it make my office more 

■ What does the future hold? efficient? ■ What are CP/M, 

UNIX, MS-DOS, and XENIX? ■ 
Will it link up with other systems? 
■ What programs will I be able to use? 
■ Can I finance my computer? ■ Will it 
require special training? ■ Can I 
use a computer for financial 
models? ■ Are there courses I 
can take? ■ Will it run a spread 
sheet program? ■ Will compu- 
ters help my budgeting? ■ Will 
it become outdated too quickly? 




*^^h^^i^^^mmm^m^^^mm^f^^*^*t**f***tf^*f**j^p^^^m^ 



ALL THE ANSWERS 
ARE NI COMPUTER FAIR 



PlW iNrf tW; tW^ rWC WW tW^ fAi fm% fwK HW' frri Hn rW^ fin I'il'l' FlW Trf^ ffW TWl 'Ml *W* *•* f#T #Wl '■* tW\ fBTT' 



Hundreds of exhibits featuring virtually 
every brand of micro hardware mar- 
keted in Canada today and some not yet 
available. See and try out the latest in Micro- 
Computer Technology. Software for every 
conceivable application -from investment 
programs to arcade games, music to machine 
language, teaching systems to 
accounting packages, word pro- 
cessors to graphic processors. 

Sample hundreds of different 
peripherals, including printers, 
hard discs, modems, memory 
cards, video displays and syn- 
thesizers, plus accessories, publi- 
cations and support services. 

Daily seminars will show you 
how to squeeze absolutely the 
most power, versatility and 



niini 



COMPUTER 



usefulness out of your computer no matter 
what the application. Seminars to teach you 
the ins and outs of buying computers and 
software intelligently. Learn about new pro- 
gramming languages, important applications 
for telecommunications, what the future 
holds, exciting ways to use your micro- 
computer and more. 

No matter what you do (or 
want to do) with your computer 
the Computer Fair seminars will 
help you do it better and best of 
all, the cost of the seminars is 
included with your admission 
fee. 

For more information contact: 
Hunter Nichols Inc., 
72 1 Progress Ave., Scarborough, 
Ontario. Tel: (416) 439-4140. 



May 10-13 
[nternational Centre Tortjntu 



Huiter Nichols Inc. 




Publisher 
Chris Bennett 

Editor 

David Williams 

Assistant Editor/ Production Mgr. 
Sandra Waugh 

Advertising Manager 
Janet Sherbanowski 

(416) 782-1861 

Production Assistants 
Astrid Kumas 
Marya Miller 

Graphic Design 

Leslie Smart and Associates 

Toronto, Ont. 

Printing 

Carswell Printing Company 

Toronto, Ont. 

Cover Photo 

Roberto Portolese Studio 

Toronto, Ont. 

TPUG Magazine is published 10 times a 
year by TPUG, Inc. All rights reserved. 
No material may be reprinted without 
written permission. 



Contents 



TPUG yearly memberships: 
Regular- $30,001 U 

Associate - $20.00 > 
Student- $20.00/ 



U.S. funds 
outside Can. 



TPUG Inc., 

1912-A Avenue Rd.,Ste.#l 
Toronto, Ont. 
M5M 4A1 

Telephone numbers: 
Business Office (416)782^8900 
(416) 782-9252 
Magazine Office (416) 782T861 
VIC 20, Commodore 64 and SuperPET 
are trademarks of Commodore Electron- 
ics Ltd. PET is a registered trademark of 
Commodore Business Machines, Inc. CBM 
is a registered trademark of Commodore 
Electronics Ltd. 

TPUG Magazine is printed in Canada. 
Second class mailing registration pending. 
Mailed at Toronto, ON and Buffalo, NY. 
Send change of address to: TPUG Inc., 
Address Changes, 1912-A Avenue Rd., 
Ste. 1, Toronto, ON M5M 4A1 
Subscription: 14,000 
Newsstand: 7,000 
ISSN #0825-0367 



Articles 

Page 

Becker's Baby — Bryan J. Luni 10 

CompuServe Vidtex — William Wilbur 37 

Curing the Single-Floppy Bug - David Williams 28 

Forecasting With the 8032 - John Shepherd 27 

G-Pascal for the 64 — Steven Damold 43 

Heswriter — Michael Quigley 24 

List Lock Revisited — Nancy Lecompte 34 

Machine Language For Beginners — 

A Review — /an Wright 31 

Robots — Jim Butterfield 14 

Sharing Peripherals — Ron Byers 18 

SuperPET Column — Brad Bjomdahl 45 

Star Trek VI - Dave Neal 50 

VIC 20 and the $28 Modem - C. Gray 40 

Write Now! — A Review — Michael Quiqley 21 



Machine 

* 


Expertise 

Level 

G 


p 


G 


A 


I 


P 


A 


C 


A 


V 


I 


vc 


I 


A 


G 


* 


G 


A 


B 


S 


B 


C 


G 


V 


I 


V 


G 



TPUG News 

Advertisers' Index 62 

BBS 46 

Calendar of TPUG Events 20 

Classified Advertising 62 

(C)T7 — List-me - David Bradley 57 

(C)T8— List-me - David Bradley 58 

Editorial — David Williams 4 

Help! 5 

Library Order Form 55 

Marketplace 16 

Meeting Reports — C-64 46 

—Central 46 

— Communications 47 

New Additions to TPUG Library 54 

This and That — Doris Bradley 8 

TPUG Associate Club Chapter Meetings 10 

TPUG BBS Password 24 

TPUG Contacts 9 

TPUG's Somewhat New BBS — Tom Shevlin .... 46 

TPUG Third Annual Conference 32 



A = all, C=C-64, V = VIC 20, P=PET/CBM, S = SuperPET,*=none 
G = General, B= Beginner, I=Intermediate, A=Advanced 



TPUG magazine page 3 



EDITORIAL 



A few weeks ago, I was involved in a 
discussion on a Bulletin Board System 
concerning^ C.P. Snow's concept of the 
"Two Cultures''. My opponent in the 
argument took Snow's viewpoint and 
suggested that a statistical survey would 
show a NEGAllVE correlation be- 
tween competence in the sciences and 
the humanities. I argued the opposite 
point of view. I believe that, on the 
whole, those people who are compe- 
tent in the sciences also tend to be 
capable in the humanities, and vice 
versa. In other w^ords, I think that most 
cultured people tend to be better in 
both artistic and technological fields 
of endeavour than are "hosers". Obvi- 
ously there are exceptions, but we were 
arguing about correlations, not about 
indiviciual cases. 

The BBS discussion is still incomplete. 
I haven't heard from my opponent since 
I offered to lay a bet of SlOO on the 
issue! However, I sometimes think 
about it as I read through many of the 
articles which are submitted to TPIJG 
Magazine. I find myself looking at pieces 
which have apparently been written 
by people who are virtually illiterate 
to see whether their authors were 
equally incapable in the areas of com- 
puter technology w^hich they have 
attempted to describe. Very often, it is 
impossible to tell. 

Of course, we are not worried by occa- 
sional typographical errors or similar 
slips. But when it becomes practically 
impossible to decipher what an article 
is about, we really have no option but 
to reject it. Sometimes I get an uneasy 
feeling that we might be throwing away 



information which might be really 
invaluable to our readers, but the deci- 
sion to reject things must be made. 

We have recently had to send several 
articles back to their authors for another 
reason: they contained listings of pro- 
grams which had been copied fi'om 
other magazines. {In one extreme case, 
the entire article had been copied from 
an overseas periodical!) Maybe some 
of our readers are not aware that vir- 
tually all magazine articles, including 
the program listings they contain, are 
copyright. We cannot legally reprint 
them without going through the proce- 
dure of getting permission to do so, 
which often involves paying a substan- 
tial fee. In exceptional cases, we may 
be prepared to go though this proce- 
dure, but we cannot afford to do so 
often. 

A few readers have commented about 
some instances of factual inaccuracies 
which have crept into our articles. While 
we do our best to avoid mistakes, and 
we do check articles to the best of our 
abilities, we cannot guarantee to catch 
all errors, especially in cases where 
the authors of articles should know a 
lot more about the topics they write 
about than we do! I would therefore 
ask everyone who gives us material or 
information for publication please to 
make very sure that it is factually 
accurate. 

Many of the articles we recei\'e are, of 
course, excellent. I sign far more accep- 
tance letters than rejection notes. Please 
keep the good ones coming! But please, 
also, please make sure that the pieces 
you send us are accurate, reasonablv 



literate and do not contain any copy- 
right material. 

The publication of program listings 
in this magazine is a topic which has 
concerned us. Since almost all of our 
readers ha\'e access to the TPUG pro- 
gram library, it is arguable that the 
most effective way in which we can get 
programs to you is simply to put them 
in the library. This might eliminate 
the need for readers to spend long 
periods of time typing programs into 
their machines, and might alsorelie\'e 
us of the need to print the listings. 
Reproducing listings accurately is one 
of the most difficult aspects of produc- 
ing a magazine such as this, since many 
of the people concerned — printers etc. 
— are not familiar with BASIC or 
machine language, and therefore can- 
not decide what features of the listings 
are important. On the other hand, there 
are certainly some readers who actu- 
ally enjoy typing in programs, and 
who would prefer to avoid the delay of 
ordering disks through the mail. 

For the time being, at least, we have 
decided to go both ways. We will print 
listings, and do our best to get them 
right. In any case where a program is 
more than a few lines long, and if we 
own the copyright to it, we will also 
submit it to the club's librarians. The 
decision as to whether the program 
will appear on a club disk is the respon- 
sibility of the librarians, but we expect 
that they will normally decide to put 
programs which have appeared in 
TPUG Magazine into the library fairly 
quickly. They will then appear in the 
List-Me files, which we publish. 

David Williams 



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page 4 TPUG magazine 



HELP! 



Do you have anything lor this colunm? The three headings are: 

(1) Helpful Hints, 

(2) Who's Got the Answer? and 

(3) ^TKT'' Pals Wanted. 

just send your contributions (including answers to any questions which have 
appeared) to: 

Toronto PET Users Group 

Depl. Help 

19I2A Avenue Rd.,Ste. 1 

Toronto, Ontario, Canada 

M5M4A1 

Please let us know^ if you wish your full address published. 



Helpful Hints 

I recently received a letter from f nt 
Friedman — he asked about "Easyscript" and 
the Gemini 10 printer in the January 
magazine. In his letter, he mentions that 
three people helped him with his problem. 
Thanks to these three, and to the many 
others who have offered help directly to 
those who have asked questions. 

Jim Butterfield has informed me that if 
you are interested in a complete, commented 
disassembly of the Commodore 64, you could 
take a look at 'The Anatomy of the C-64" 
from Abacus Software, P.O. Box 73211, 
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49510. The cost is 
$19.95. 

Doris Bradley #10,000 
Assistant Business Manager 

(?) How do people feel about the C-64 Rabbit 
Cartridge from. Eastern House — George Baker, 
New York. 

1 have had the VIC 20 Rabbit for three 
months or so and am almost entirely pleased 
with it. 1 can load a 8430 (decimal) byte 
program in 33.89 seconds. The append func- 
tion alone is worth the price. . . Just type 
"*A" to add a'subroutine (or anything else) 
to a program already in memory. 

Tm not too swift when it comes to using 
programs with files, but the Rabbit will 
speed up reading and writing files by a 
factor of at least 10. 

I could go on and on about the virtues of 
the Rabbit. At S39.95 it is over 80% less 
costly than disc and far less complicated. 1 
personally feel that, for use in the home 
environment, the Rabbit is more than 
satisfactory. The only drawback that I could 
foresee would be the lack of commercially 
available taped programs for the C-64. 

Michael M. Broumberg #2593 
Baltimore, Maryland 



(?) Comment on the lack of spare parts for the 
Commodore 1702 monitor — Robert Baker 

— New Jersev. 

Asst.Bus.Man. note: We've broken a record 
on this question — 5 different answers came 
in — here they are. 

1 bought my Commodore brand 8-pin DIN 
cable (for 1701/1702 monitor) from AB 
Computers, 252 Bethlehem Pike, Colmar, 
Pennsylvania 18915 -phone 215/822-7727. 
They were very knowledgeable about the 
5-pin and 8-pin cables and compatibility 
with the old and new C-64's. 

Gary Stone #1577 
P.O. Box 153 
Annapolis Junction, 
MD 20701 

There are three ways to solve this problem. 

( 1 ) On the supplied cable, carefully slip off 
the plastic/rubber cover of the 8-pin DIN 
plug. Purchase a 5-pin DIN plug. Locate 
the wires for Chroma, Audio, and Luma. 
Refer to diagram in the Commodore 64 
Owners Manual (Page 142), and wire to the 
5-pin DIN plug. Assemble the DIN plug 
and slide the plastic/rubber cover back over 
it. 

(2) Purchase a 5-pin DIN plug and 3 RCA 
plugs. Also get required length of 75 ohm 
cable, preferably the type that is the size of 
pencil lead. Caution: Use only 75 ohm or 
close to this type impedance. Make up your 
own cable and use the diagram in the own- 
ers manual (page 142), with 3 RCA plugs 
and the 5-pin DIN plug. 

(3) You can purchase an lnterex-5 6ft.com- 
puter to monitor interface cable. This is 
made by Data Share Inc. This has 4 RCA 
plugs and a 5-pin DIN plug and will work 
with monochrome or color monitors of many 
types. It comes with instructions. Approxi- 



mate cost — S15 U.S. 

All 3 of these methods will work with the 
C-64 and the 1701 or 1702 color monitors. 
There are computer owners in my area 
who have used all 3 methods with no 
problems. 

The cables hook up in back just like the 
cable instructions for the 1702 and 8rpin 
DIN/RCA plug type on the older models 
and you will not have decreased resolution. 

Anyone who wants more information can 
call or write me. 

Marvin Lowman #4682 
P.O. Box 111 
Inwood, WV 25428 
304/229-3322 

1 have a similar situation in that I pur- 
chased a 1702 monitor and cable which came 
with it connected to my Commodore 64 
fine but 1 also desire to use it with my VIC 
20. 

After numerous calls to Commodore in 
December, during which I got a recording 
or a busy signal or was put on hold and 
never connected, I finally wrote a letter to 
them. I received the following reply: 

"Dear Mr. Koeb: Thank you for your inter- 
est in Commodore products. In reference 
to your letter concerning the monitor cable 
you received with the 1702 monitor, you 
may send the cable along with a brief letter 
of explanation to the attention of our Ser- 
vice Department at the address above and 
the proper cable will be expedited. If you 
need more information, please write or call 
the customer support team at 21 5/436-4200." 

The address was: Commodore, Computer 
Systems Division, 1200 Wilson Drive, West 
Chester, PA 19380 Attn: Ser\' ice Department. 

I have not sent in a request for a cable for 
my situation yet but I thought this may 
help others lln the same situation. 

Rod Koeb #11229 
Montrose, Pennsylvania 

Commodore shifted from the 5-pin DIN 
jack to the 8-pin when they realized that 
people were accidentally connecting the 
5-pin power plug into the video output 
jack. 

Simply replace the 8-pin DIN plug on the 
1702 monitor cable with a 5-pin DIN plug. 
Your "Commodore 64 Programmers Refer- 
ence Guide" shows the proper pins in the 
guide at page 396. Pin 1 is luma, pin 4 is 
chroma, and pin 3 is audio. The other pins 
are ground, and audio in, which is an intri- 
guing concept, but not necessary here. 

Geoff Worstell # 8307 
Sacramento. California 

continued overleaf 



TPUG magazine page 5 



I have been marketing such a cable since 
Commodore switched from the 1701 to the 
1702. If anyone would like to purchaseone, 
send me a check or money order for SlO.OO 
U.S., and I will ship it the day the order is 
received. These cables have a 5-pin DIN 
connector on one end and three RCA-type 
plugs on the other. 

Mike Yoder #6692 

3501 E. Locust 

Ft. Collins, CO 805249 

(?jl need a good mulhple regression program 
for my CBM — Len Green, Timrnins 

I just answered my first HELP question, I 
have a linear multiple regression written 
for my old PET 2001 in 1978. Its adapted 
from the great UCLA biomedical statistics 
collection which was made public domain 
in 1968. 

It's great to stand on the shoulders of the 
giants who made computing practical and 
TPUG is one of the great giants of the 80's. 

Frank Alexander #5005 
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 

Note: Another question for such a program, 
but this time for the Commodore 64, has 
come in. Can anybody help member #10,599, 
G. S. Larouche, 1060 D'Ailleboust, Laval, 
PQ H7G 4L3? 



(?) The 8032 and the Signalman modem —Jim 
Borst, Wisconsin 

1 also have an 8032 with a Signalman Mark 
IV modem and the Mcterm software pack- 
age, but I have never had the problems you 
mentioned. I had no problem running the 
software that came with the modem either. 
I also have the vidtex software from Com- 
puServe and that works well with this set 
up. I would tend to believe your problem 
lies in your telephones somewhere rather 
than in the modem or software. As an addi- 
tional note, one of the phones (not the one 
in the computer room) is a cordless type 
phone but it has never caused any prob- 
lems in interference either. I assume you 
know that it is necessary to leave the phone 
your modem is connected to off the hook 
on order for communications to take place, 
but having to leave 2 phones off the hook 
for things to work is definitely not right. 

Dennis Irvine #3346 
Grass Valley, California 

(?) A simple ^'how-to" explanation for the 
Z-RAM — E. Grafe, Pennsylvama 

I have the Z-Ram board and have been 
using it for several months now. I have to 
agree that the manual is not very helpful in 
making it easy to use. Some software you 
can get, — such as Visicalc 96 and Wordpro 



5 — run well on the Z-RAM and require no 
special knowledge to run. To do your own 
programming to take advantage of the addi- 
tional memory by bank-switching is quite 
complicated and 1 have not got it figured 
out yet. It appears to me that the only 
expedient way to use the additional mem- 
ory is through PEEKs, POKEs and Machine 
Language. I spoke to Paul Matzke at Madi- 
son Computers several times about this and, 
at one point, they were working on a ROM 
addition that would handle all this for you; 
but they have dropped that now since they 
don't feel there is enough demand for it. I 
like the Z-RAM board because it gives me 
7 times the space on Visicalc, which I use a 
lot, and it works with CP/M programs also; 
but the additional memory is not very use- 
ful in your own programming or in con- 
verting existing programs. It is too bad 
because the potential is there to use the 
extra memory not only as a RAM disk but 
also as a printer buffer and as a Security 
ROM emulator. I would be very interested 
in communicating with anyone else who 
has the Z-RAM board to share ideas and 
experience. 

Dennis Irvine #3346 
Grass Valley, California 



HELP-Questions 



Does anyone know of a fast way of dump- 
ing a Commodore LOGO picture to a Gem- 
ini lOX printer with a Cardco interface. If 
so, please write to: 

Donald Sturgeon, Principal #79 
Old Town High School 
Old Town, Maine 04468 

How do I use my C-64 to transmit and 
receive HAM-SSTV? Apple does it, so I 
should be able to too. 

Bill T. Munsil #9635 
P.O. Box 906 
Yarnell, AZ 85362 

Does anyone know why the Commodore 
Editor/Assembler system will not allow 
macro's as advertised? I have talked with a 
number of people with the same problem. 
Any help would be appreciated. 

Ward H. Zimmerman #13,349 
Newport, North Carolina 

A question regarding "Easy Dungeon" on 
(C)G3. What are you supposed to do once 
you find the Holy Grail? 

Ari Weintraub #12,928 
Philadephia, Pennsylvania 

There used to be an authorized Commo- 



dore dealer on Prince Edward Island, but 
he went out of business a while ago and 
although the products are available through 
several large retail outlets, there is no source 
of information or service. The people only 
shrug and say, "I don't know." If some- 
thing doesn't work it can usually be returned 
for replacement but if older equipment 
needs work we have no place to go. Is there 
any way to deal with this situation? 

H.J. Thompson #12,042 
Crapaud, Prince Edward Island 

I am looking for someone who has an ama- 
teur radio MSO in operation utilizing either 
a PET 4032 8c Dual Drive or a Commodore 
C-64 with 1541 drive. It is my intention to 
operate such a system on VHF radio in the 
London area. 

Jim De Zorzi #2728 

P.O. Box 88 

Hyde Park, ON NOM IZO 

Can anyone point me in the right direction 
to access the extra memory available on the 
64K expansion board for the 8032? I recently 
replaced my office 8032 with an 8096, and it 
arrived in perfect working condition, but 
without a single word of advice on how to 
access the extra memory for our in-house 



software. I am strongly inclined to buy the 
64K expansion board to upgrade my 8032 
at home for use with WordPro 5H-, but part 
of the justification will be the usefulness of 
the added memory for other programs. 
Advice? Literature? Help! 

Peter A. Pattee #2479 
2614 Northwood Drive 
Ames, Iowa 50010 

In using my VIC 20 with the 1525 printer, I 
find theabsenceofaccentstobea handicap, 
since I often work in French. Can anybody 
help by suggesting a way of obtaining these 
characters. 

Robert Guyot #9732 
414-2767 Innes Rd. 
Gloucester, ONK1B4L4 

I am looking for programs that can be used 
as a help in growing tomatoes, paprika, 
cucumbers and salat in a thermal environ- 
ment (greenhouse). I also would like to get 
in touch with others from the U.S.A., Can- 
ada or Scandinavia in order to trade public 
domain programs. 

Bjorgvin Bjarnason #7675 
Kveldufsgotu 10 
310 Borgarnesi 
Iceland 

tontuiued on next fcige 



page 6 TPUG magazine 



I have 2000 or more records on iMTile that 
I would now ,ike to write to Flexfile. Does 
anyone have a program that would write 
the records to a sequential file that Flexfile 
could read? I have two 1541's set to devices 
8 and 9, and a Commodore 64. 

Thomas Bailey #4626 
2801 Rolido, Apt. 22 
Houston, TX 77063 

I'm looking for a Stamp Inventory pro- 
gram for my C-64. Does anyone have one 
or know where I can obtain one? 

Richard R. Poitras #8078 
21 Nedwied Rd. 
W. Willington, CT 06279 
Phone 203/872-8694 

I am using a Quick Brown Fox cartridge 
word processor with my Commodore 64 
and a VIC 1525 printer and a Commodore 
cassette recorder. I'm generally very pleased 
with the whole package but would like to 
use some 'custom characters' to replace the 
lower case 'y', 'g', 'q', and 'p' which cur- 
rently come out on the printer. Is there 
something that can be done? I know how to 
make custom characters and save them but 
I can't figure out how to do this with the 
QBF. If anybody knows, please help. 

Alan Ogborne #10284 
445 Palmtree Ave. 
London, ON N6H 3P4 

Who can help me locate a typing program 



for the 4032 PET that 13 and 14 year-old 
students in our library may use? It may be 
diskette or cassette. 

Judy Rockefeller #12404 
Rondout Valley Middle School 
P.O. Box 9 
Accord, NY 12404 

I like to use my own character set (2K mem- 
ory size) in BLK#3 (SCOGG-SFFFF) in the 
RAM section (SCOOO-SCFFF). I do know 
how to put it to BLK#2 but failed in BLK#3. 
Can anyone help? 

I recently purchased the MPS-801 printer. 
I would like to replace the printer's built-in 
character set with my own defined set (in 
hardware). I checked the printer and found 
in it a 4K EPROM, type 2732. This EPROM 
contains the printer's character set. However, 
I couldn't find the character array and code 
as understandable. I need help. 

IIanOgen# 10022 
Floor Six 
850 3rd Ave. 
New York, NY 10022 

I own a Commodore 64 computer and desire 
to use it to plot the performance of stocks 
with charts; i.e. plot the high, low, and 
close on a daily basis as well as plotting a 
variable average of the daily closing price. 
I have searched the advertisements of 
numerous magazines and have been unsuc- 
cessful in finding a program that would 



provide me with the desired capability. I 
would greatly appreciate receiving any 
leads. 

L. D. Couch 
Oxnard, California 

I'm looking for a book or manual of easy to 
understand programming and file handling 
on the Commodore 64. 

Roy H. Williams, 
Management Dept. 
Memphis State University 
Memphis, TN 38152 

I am getting frustrated with the I54I disk 
drive. Would combining the 4040 drive 
with the C-64 create any problems? Does 
Commodore still make the 4040? What 
would you recommend as a good interface 
between the 4040 drive and the C-64? 

Brendan Westhoven #7899 

140 Mescal Loop 

Lake Havasu, AZ 86403 

Can anyone help a stranded star traveller? 
We love the adventure game "Planet Fall" 
from Inlocom as far as we have gone. How 
does one get anything except Floyd working? 
(We w^ent down the elevator but couldn't 
get the shuttle going.) 

Correna Carter #9017 
2380 French Rd., R.R. #3, 
Sooke, BC VOS INO 



HELP-Pals 



Is there someone in the club who would 
care to correspond about adventure 
games? 

Lois Alvarez #13906 
Clearwater, Florida 

I would like to find a French-speaking VIC 
20 user with whom 1 can correspond and 
exchange programs, particularly in French. 

Lonnie Smathers #13711 
Greenwood, South Carolina 

I would like to get in touch with anybody 
interested in medical software. 

F. A. Malagon #11347 
San Diego, California 

I'm putting together a directory of clubs, 
which will have a section on computer clubs. 
If there is anyone interested in being listed, 
please send the following: computer club 
name, complete address, president's name, 
what the club does, a copy of a recent 
newsletter. Anyone interested in getting a 



copy of the book should send 50 cents for 
postage and handling. 

Gina Cianfarani 
90 Gulliver Rd. 
Toronto, ON M6M 2M6 

If you want to practice your French in cor- 
responding regarding the C-64, I want the 
same thing, but in English. So write to me 
in French and I will answer you in English. 

Jean Parent #96 
313-45 rue O 

Charlesboure 
PQG1H5K1 

I would be interested in corresponding with 
other members with VICs and 64's. 

Brendan Westhoven #7899 

140 Mescal Loop 

Lake Havasu, AZ 86403 

I would be interested in communicating 
with anyone who uses the Z-RAM board. If 
possible you can send E-MAIL on Com- 



puServe to Dennis 73115,24. 

Dennis Irvine #3346 

616 Pelton Way 

Grass Valley, CA 95945 




ANV 00& CAAJ GRiNG (N THE MeWSPAPER... 

I COAJM£CT My MASTER U/iTH TAJE S0<J*5<^£- 



TPUG magazine page 



THIS & THAT 



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Doris Bradley 

AssL Bus. Man. 

TPUG now has over 14,000 active 
members! Member number 14,000 is 
Grant Smith of Cobourg, Ontario- He 
has a Commodore 64. 

Commodore 64 Library 

The Commodore 64 library is grow- 
ing by leaps and bounds. There are 
times when I wonder whether the 
librarians are going to be buried by 
the library, or whether they will be 
able to keep on top of it. There is cur- 
rently the problem of having too many 
programs each month to fit on one 
disk. The solution to the problem — the 
creation of another category in the C-64 
library. Shortly there will appear (C)M1 
which will be the first of a series of 
extra monthly disks. We define the 
"M" as More Monthlies, or Many More 
Monthlies. We ask that those of you 
who have signed up for the Disk/ Tape 
of the Month indicate to us whether or 
not you wish the "M" series as well as 
the "T" series. 

Programming Contest 

By the time you receive this magazine, 
the 10-line contest will be over, since 
the deadline was April Isl. But do not 
despair, the co-ordinating committee 
of the VIC 20 chapter has decided to 
run a contest for programs for the VIC 
20 library. There are two sections to 
the contest: one for programs written 
in BASIC, and the other for programs 
written in Machine Language (or an- 
other language). The prizes are ex- 
pected to be expanders for the VIC 20, 
and the co-ordinating committee for 
the VIC 20 chapter will be the judges. 



I'll publish the final deadline in the 
next magazine, but there's no time like 
NOW to gel started! 

Commodore Educational Software 

Things are pretty much under control 
on this front. The disks are all work- 
ing well in 4040 and 8050 versions 
(thanks to Commodore Canada) and 
the tapes are coming in, though we are 
still not in the position of having a 
slock on hand from which to fill orders. 
There have been staff changes and ill- 
ness at Richvale Telecommunications, 
our supplier of the tapes, but things 
are looking up. 

Interested in Programming Logic Games 
for the VIC 20 or the C-64? 

The newly-formed computer games 
group intends not only to adapt popu- 
lar board and other existing games, 
but also to develop games and really 
utilize the computer's potential. (Logic 
games require building 'reason' into 
the programs so that the computer can 
function as your opponent.) Interested 
in joining in? (Programming will be 
primarily in BASIC) Call 1-416-486-7835 
before noon for further information. 

Calling the TPUG Office 

It's always a good idea when phoning 
the office to identify yourself by name, 
to inform us if you are calling long 
distance, particularly if you are paying 
for the call yourself, and to have your 
membership number close at hand. 

If you are inquiring about an order, 
it's wise to have the names of the 
disks/tapes written down, and to know 
exactly when you mailed the order. 
You may save yourself a call by first 
checking to see if your cheque has yet 
cleared the bank. Please allow four to 
six weeks from the time you mail the 
order for delivery of your order. We'll 
try to get them to you sooner, but can 
make no promises. 

Disks versus Tapes 

After being in this office for over a 
year, and having seen literally thou- 
sands of disks and tapes shipped out, I 
have come to the conclusion that the 
reliability of disks far outweighs the 



reliability of tapes for a variety of 
reasons. As a result, I would suggest 
that you purchase disks, and if neces- 
sary, transfer them to tape, rather than 
purchase tapes. As a matter of fact, 
there is a program by Jim Butterfield 
on (C)T8 which will do just that (transfer 
from disk to tape). This program will 
appear on a PET disk shortly. 

Strictly Commodore 

Some months ago, a gentleman from 
the Maritimes wrote to Dept. Help 
asking for someone in Calgary to inter- 
vene on his behalf with Strictly Com- 
modore in Calgary. Our contact per- 
son in the Calgary Commodore Users 
Group has informed me that the Cal- 
gary City Police would be interested 
in having any person who has sent a 
cheque to Strictly Commodore and not 
got any satisfaction, send a photocopy 
of the cancelled cheque and a note 
giving the details to the Calgary City 
Police, Fraud Division, Calgary, Al- 
berta. 

New Club Chapters 

Since I last reported on the computer 
clubs which have taken advantage of 
the offer to have 15 or more of their 
members join TPUG, the list has 
mushroomed. There are now over 1400 
who have joined or renewed in this 
way! Additional groups which have 
joined us are: Riverdale Collegiate 
Computer Club — Toronto, Bruce C-64 
Users' Group-Ontario, COMVIC 
— Bracebridge Ontario, Commodore 
Users' Society of Greenville — South 
Carolina, Commodore Users' Group 
of Rochester — New York, Baden Com- 
puter Club — West Germany, Winnipeg 
PET Users' Group — Manitoba, Com- 
modore Users' Group of Masset — 
British Columbia, Southern Minne- 
sota Commodore Users' Group, Saska- 
toon Commodore Users' Group — Sas- 
katchewan, Tri-Cities Commodore 
Computer Club — Washington, 

Com mo-Hawk Commodore Users' 
Group — Cedar Rapids Iowa, Commo- 
dore Houston Users' Group — Texas, 
Lehigh Valley Commodore Users' 
Group— Pennsylvania, and last but not 
least, Hawkes Bay Commodore Users' 
Group — Ne^^' 7.o;ilancl. 

continued on next page 



page 8 TPUG magazine 



(C)T6 

The Commodore 64 librarians were 
not aware that the program SPEED- 
SCRIPT,C had appeared in Computc!'s 
Gazette until the Commodore 64 meet- 
ing at the end of February. This pro- 
gram has now been removed from 
(C)T6 since Computel's Gazette claims 
copyright to the programs printed in 
their magazine. One is supposed to 
have a Computel's Gazette program 
only if you own the appropriate copy 
of the magazine. Please don't submit 
any programs from Compute! or Com- 
putel's Gazette to the library. 

Conference 1984 

Well, the registration forms are roll- 
ing in. As of March 9th, we had more 
than 250 registered. Please check the 
detailed information elsewhere in this 
magazine. By the time you read this, 
no doubt some sessions will be filled to 
capacity. Remember to pre-register, 
you must have your form in by May 
11th at the latest. After that it's registra- 
tion at the door. 

HAMs 

Even though we have published two 
lists of HAM operators who belong to 
TPUG, there are still more call sig- 



nals coming in. Perhaps next issue will 
see yet another list! 

Video Projector 

If you're interested in renting our 
monochrome video projector, and are 
within 50 miles of the TPUG office, 
give us a call at 782-9252 or 782-8900. 

Hamilton/Burlington Chapter? 

If you live in the Hamilton/Burlington 
area and are interested in a TPUG 
chapter there, please call Mike Donegan 
639-0329 after 6 p.m. 

Mailing List 

In order to raise money and thereby 
defer a possible increase in member- 
ship fees, it has been suggested that 
TPUG rent the mailing list for the 
mailing primarily of computer-related 
material. If this arrangement is made, 
the office will provide the labels and 
either the mailing will be done directly 
from this office, or the labels will be 
delivered to a reputable mailing house 
who assembles the packages and mails 
them directly. This would mean that 
the list will not be sold, i.e. the list will 
not be provided to any commercial 
organization w^hich might then sell the 
list etc. 



If you do not w^sh to have your name 
included on such a list, please let the 
office know and we will flag your entry 
in the computer. 

Here is an example. . . Members in 
Metro Toronto recently received infor- 
mation about computer courses at 
Harbourfront which was mailed out 
directly from this office. The club does 
not intend to seek out renters for the 
list, but will only react to requests. 

New Chapters 

Three new chapters in the Greater 
Toronto area will have their first meet- 
ings in June. The Eastside chapter will 
meet in Pickering, probably at Dun- 
barton High School. The South Lake 
chapter, encompassing the area south 
of Lake Simcoe and north of Metro, 
will probably meet at Uxbridge High 
School. The third chapter, the Bramp- 
ton chapter does not have a tentative 
meeting place yet. 

If you are interested in any of these 
groups, please call the office during 
office hours, Monday to Friday, 8:30 
to 5:00. TPUG 



TPUG CONTACTS 

••••••••••••••••••• 



*Presideni 
*Vice-Presideni 
*Vice-President 
*Treasurer 
*Recording Sec. 
•Business Man. 
Asst. Bus. Man. 

TPUG Magazine 

Publisher 
Editor 
Asst. Editor 
Ad Manager 

Meeting Co-ordinators 

*Cenlral Chapter 
*C-64 Chapter 
Communications 
Machine Language 



Michael Bonnycastle 
Chris Bennett 
Cord Campbell 
Carol Shevlin 
John Shepherd 
Chris Bennett 
Doris Bradley 



Chris Bennett 
David Williams 
Sandra Waugh 
Janet Sherbanowski 



Michael Bonnycastle 
Louise Redgers 
David Williams 
Jim Carswell 



416/654-2381 
416/782-9252 
416/492-9518 
c/o 416/782-8900 
416/244-1487 
416/782-8900 
416/782-8900 



416/782-1861 
416/782-1861 
416/782-1861 
416/782-1861 



416/654-2381 

416/447-4811 
416/782-1861 
416/531-9909 



*SuperPET Chapter 


Gerry Gold 


416/225-8760 


VIC 20 Chapter 


(Doris Bradley) 


416-782-8900 


*W('Stside Chapter 


fohn Easton 


416/251-15LI 


Westside Chapter 


Al Farquharson 


519/442-7000 


Librarians 






Commodore 64 


David Bradley 


416/782-8900 




Richard Bradley 


416/782-7320 


French 


Baudouin St-Cyr 


c/o 416/782-8900 


*PET 


Mike Donegan 


416/6:39-0329 


SuperPET 


Bill Dutheld 


416/224-0642 


VIC 20 


Craig Bonner 


416/663-4025 


Assistant 


Chris Covell 


416/925-9296 


Bulletin Boards 


Steve Punter 


416/624-5431 


*Conference 


Cord Campbell 


416/492-0518 


•Director 


Bruce Beach 


519/925-5376 


^Director 


Rosemary Beaslcy 


416/787-8432 


•Director 


Gary Croft 


416/727-8795 



* TPUG Board of Directors 



TPUG m.agazine page 9 



BECKER'S BABY 

- The Million Dollar Superchild Has A VIC Heart 



photos bv R. Portolese 




Randy with creator Becker. 



Bryan J. Lunt 

Toronto, Ontario 

Flash Gordon outwitted them, Sup- 
erman scattered their components 
throughout the Universe. Everybody 
knows our Super-herot's won the bat- 
tle but now we're discovering they lost 
the war. According to a recent Industry, 
Trade and Commerce prediction the 
Robot population of America will, by 
1988, number between five and eight 
million. However, usinga recent indus- 
trial show as a yardstick, it would be 
easy to scoff at the forecast. Several 
"user friendly", robots were on view at 
the show but with only three arms and 
a handful of plug in voice boxes between 
them, the "invasion" took on all the 
aspects of a social visit from Fred 
Karno's army. Obviously the robots 
need a champion and it seems they 
have found one in a bright little chap 
called Randy. Equipped with a VIC 20 
"heart", drastically modified by a num- 
ber of Eproms and some additional 
memory (32k in ROM plus 32k of 
RAM), he has so many "smarts" avail- 
able that Superman will need a lot 
more than Krypton in the next en- 
counter. 

The telephone at Jack Becker's house 
competes with the door bell and, whilst 
nobody has yet asked "Is Randy home?", 
it's Becker's creation most of the cal- 
lers are interested in. The Chicago- 
born, Toronto-based inventor, who has 
an incredible background in radio, a 
Masters degree in electronics, a degree 
in Psychology and considerable expo- 
sure to frontier science whilst holding 
a high level technical post with the 



U.S Government, is a TPUG member 
with an avid interest in Robotics and a 
considerable amount of practical expe- 
rience complementing his technical 
know-how. A long time radio control 
enthusiast, he was commissioned by 
Walt Disney to produce 29 robots for 
Disneyland in 1967. Three years later 
he made 31 more when Disney World 
opened, and Heathkit's "Hero" was a 
computerized version of a Becker pro- 
totype. But, as he insists I mention, he 
has known rejection. In 1978, when he 
offered an early version of Randy to 
Atari, he was rejected because his robot 
was " ahead of its time ". 

Becker takes that remark very seriously. 
"Robotics is more than just technol- 
ogy", he says. "Consumers have a resent- 
ment associated with the childhood edu- 
cational concept of avoiding strangers, 
and most of us have a natural instinct 
to compete. It is essential that design 
follows an ugly, toy-like format to gain 
acceptance; it can be introduced only 
in small doses". " A robot with human- 
oid form, superior intellect and greater 
physical ability is at this stage unac- 
ceptable by our society". 



As far as Randy's appearance is con- 
cerned, the builder has adhered rig- 
idly to his concept. The white ABS 
plastic shell is simple and almost fea- 
tureless, a red bow tie adds a child-like 
quality but it's all a facade. Hidden 
behind the shell its VIC 20 central 
processing unit controls so much inno- 
vation that Becker would be modest in 
claiming that he had "re-invented the 
wheel". Instead he quotes names that 
include Ari Burman and Gord Goebel 
who spent hours designing an arm with 
three sensors and the ability to lift 30 
pounds, Paul Shields, who burned a 
considerable amount of midnight oil 
to come up with some machine lan- 
guage routines that, combined with 
Jim Butterfield know-how, helped cre- 
ate a unique form of artificial intel- 
ligence. "It took countless hours of 
unpaid dedication from these and 
others." Becker emphasises, "Each time 
we modified something it created bugs 
and each time we fixed bugs we cre- 
ated more bugs. It also took money. I 
estimate "Randy" has cost me about 




continued overleaf 



page 10 TPUG magazine 




50% of what the Million Dollar man 
was appraised at !" 

There has been some income. An inno- 
vative sonar module design sent out 
for manufacture brought in a six fig- 
ure cheque plus royalties to follow from 
the company who had been asked to 
produce the item. Randy's sonar now 
works at the bottom of an oil well drill 
shaft scanning rock formations half a 
mile below the earth's surface. It not 
only sees the rock formation in dark- 
ness but is able to photograph it with 
sound. 

One of the most challenging problems 
in robotics is the reproduction of human 
speech. An extremely simplified intro- 
duction to this would explain that plu- 
rals are illogical. The plural of "dog" 
is "dogs" but the plural of "man" is 
"men". Some 87% of words are spelled 
phonetically but 13%= are not. Words 
change completely. "A boy" is correct 
but "a olive" is not. If one considers 
that English has 40 primary phonemes 
(the smallest elements of spoken sound), 
sixteen vowel sounds 24 consonants 
and that all sounds can be changed by 
accents or regional dialects, then every- 
thing seems as rational as Lewis Car- 
roll's "Jabberwocky". 

Becker feels that in this field his team 
has made its most significant improve- 
ment. "We used the number one voice 
recognition board and found ourselves 
totally unsatisfied. We had only 80 
words in the vocabulary that could be 
recognized and translated into subse- 
quent action. It accepted only one 
programmer's voice at a time. We 
became impatient with having to run 
through the 80 words four times and 
finally getting an 80% response aver- 
age in use. The solution was a 16 bit 
Nippon microprocessor upgraded to 
32k of ROM and 64k of RAM plus a 
different method of tackling the prob- 



lem. Our own unit accepts instructions 
from eight different voices, can han- 
dle vocal ranges of soprano to bass, it 
accepts dialects, accents and volume 
changes and has the additional pho- 
nemes that allow programming in any 
language. The unit gives us 80% re- 
sponse rate when it takes commands 
from 8 different voices, and 100% from 
a single voice. We achieve these results 
from a single instruction set and we 
have no restrictions on the number of 
commands other than the storage space 
available for them". 

The voice synthesizer shows a similar 
concern for perfection. "It's smaller, a 
Z 80 with 32K of ROM and 8K in RAM, 
but nothing on the market comes re- 
motely close to it," Becker explained. 
"We've placed 1290 words in the vocab- 
ulary but another 60,000 can be added. 
The additional entries can be made in 




the owner's voice and, by using pho- 
nemes and a word memory bank simul- 
taneously, the synthesizer can handle 
the abrupt cut-offs encountered in 
Spanish, the lilt of an Irish voice and 
the different sounds one perceives 
between an Oriental conversation and 
a Texan one". 

Randy has a built in motion detector 

that is multidirectionallv effective 
within a hundred feet. It can classify 
human, animal and inanimate objects 
at a similar range. Randy can also hear 
a finger snap at that distance and be 
programmed to investigate anything 
unusual. "Tell Randy to go look at 
something, and that's exactly what he 
will do", said Becker. "He has ISO 
degree vision and a photographic mem- 
ory bank plus a sonic memory bank 
that separates you from an inanimate 
object. If you pass his scrutiny he can 
greet you by name. Alternatively he 
will request a password. Ignore him 
and you will be followed and photo- 



graphed at 30 frames per second whilst 
his alternate processor will be tele- 
phoning the local police station to com- 
plain about you". 

The "alternate processor", another 
piece of wizardry from Becker's fertile 
imagination, includes a radio telephone 
link on a small circuit board which is 
interfaced with the command, logic 
and voice modules and, with over 200 
channels available, there's a lot of scope 
for the robot controlling external de- 
vices. A few channels would be pre- 
committed to the police and fire sta- 
tion and an "incoming" line permits 
the robot to monitor and handle tele- 
phone messages received. 

Enthused by the response he has en- 
countered, Becker has recently opened 
a plant with an anticipated first year's 
run set at 10,000 units. Five hundred 
are committed to an Arizona busi- 
nessman who has already handed a 
sizeable chunk of money over to secure 
the deal and, with a string of promo- 
tional appearances, Randy is likely to 
be around for a long time. 

The future of Robotics? Becker smiled 
and, asking me to hold out my hand, 
placed a few items on the palm of it. . .1 
had a double sided disc drive holding 
a million bytes and measuring4 inches 
by 4 inches and about an inch in thick- 
ness. . .1 had a 1.2mm television cam- 
era that could see 180 degrees and had 
8 built in ROM chips which produced 
digital pictures one could store directly 
on the drive (it was a I inch cylinder 
that was about 2 inches long). . .1 had a 
6 inch by 3 inch TV monitor that was 
about a quarter inch thick. . .finally, 
like a mischievous schoolboy. Jack 
Becker answered my question by quot- 
ing the lines from the Million Dollar 
man Television show. . ."We have the 
technology. . .", he said. Indeed you 
have, Jack Becker. TPVG 




TPUG magazine page 11 



POWER 64 

Basic Utility for the 

Commodore 64 



Easy to learn 

Easy to use 

Program faster and more 
efficiently with better results 

MOREPOWER included FREE 

Powerful Programnner's Utility 

by Brad Templeton 

Manual by Jim Butterfield 




PAL 64 

Assembler for the 

Commodore 64 



• Easy to learn (69.95) 

• Easy to use 

• Fast 

• Comprehensive manual 

Personal assembly language 

by Brad Templeton 

also available for the Commodore 

4,000 — 8,000 — 9,000 series 



VIC-20 SOFTWARE 

Lode Runner (K) $49.95 

IFR (Flight Simulator) (K) $49.95 

MD001 Snakman $19.95 

SYN002 Crabs SPECIAL $9.95 

SYN003 Cyclones* SPECIAL $9.95 

CS01 3 Astroblitz (K) $49.95 

CS016 Apple Panic (K) $49.95 

CS017 Choplifter (K) $49.95 

CS018 Black Hole (K) $49.95 

ORM004 Crossfire $29.95 

HESC307 Shamus (K) $49.95 

Introduction to Basic I $49.95 

Introduction to Basic II $49 95 

Frantic Si 9.95 

Wacky Waiters $19.95 

■ Requires 3K exp (K) Cartridge 

COMMODORE 64 SOFTWARE 

Music Machine (cart) S 32.95 

Music Composer (cart) S 32.95 

Sysres 64 $79.95 

Superbase 64 (Database) $129.95 

Power 64 $69.95 

Pal 64 $69.95 

Beachead (disk) $39.95 

Neutral Zone (disk) $39.95 

Blue Max (disk) $42.95 
Grand Master Chess (disk & tape) $39.95 

Munchman 64 (tape) $19.95 

Cyclons 64 (disk) $19.95 

Fori Apocalypse (disk) $42.95 

Survivor (disk) $42.95 

Jumpman (disk) $49.95 

Jumpman Junior (cart.) $54.95 

Shamus (disk) $42.95 

Lode Runner (disk) $49.95 

Personality Analyzer (disk) $29.95 



BOOKS 



JOYSTICKS 



Sprite Graphics for C-64 $ 20.95 

Machine Language for Beginners $18.95 

64 Sound & Graphics $18.95 

Best of Transactor Vol I. $12.00 

Best of Transactor Vol. II. $16.00 

PET Basic $19.95 

VIC 20 Prog. Reference Guide $29.95 

Elementary Commodore 64 $18.95 

C64 Prog. Reference Guide $27.95 

VIC Revealed $18.95 

VIC Graphics $18.95 

VIC Games $18.95 

Compute's first book of PET/CBM $19.95 
Compute's first book of 

Commodore 64 $18.95 

COMPUTER SUPPLIES 



CIO Cassette Tapes 
C20 Cassette Tapes 

Cassette Boxes 
Verbatim Disks M0525-01 
Memorex Disks 013481 
Nashua Disks SS/DD 

K10 Disk Storage Box 
Flip Sort Storage Box 



$1.00 ea. 
$1.25 ea. 

.25 ea. 

$44.00/10 

$33.90/10 

$29.90/10 

$5.95 
$39.95 



PET/CBM SOFTWARE 



Sargon II Chess (Tape) 

POWER 

8040-80 col 4.0 sys 

4040-40 col 4.0 sys 



$42.95 
$119.95 



Kraft Joystick 
WICO Power Grip 
WICO Track Ball 
WICO Red Ball 
Commodore Joystick 



$27.95 
$39.95 
$69.95 
$44. 9S 
$9.95 



*AII Joysticks will fit VIC 20 or Commodore 64 computers 

MISCELLANEOUS 

RAMAX 

VIC-20 Memory Expansion Board 

To equal the total memory of RAMAX''''*^ you would 

have to buy a 16k Memory Expansion, PLUS an 

8k Expansion, PLUS 3k Expansion, THEN you would 

need a "mother board". With RAMAX^w you buy 

just ONE piece ... at ABOUT HALF THE PRICE! 

•Adds up to a full 27k bytes of additional RAM 
to the standard VIC-20's internal RAM of 5k. 

NOW ONLY 
$175.00 

ORDERING INFORMATION 

Cheque, Money Order, VISA, Master Card accepted. 
Ontario residents add 7% sales tax. Add 5% for shipping 
{minimum charge $1.00). 

NOTE: All Prices In Canadian Funds. 



VjSA 




w 



ELEcnonic^ 2001 ltd. 

5529 Yonge Street, Wlllowdale, Ontario M2N 583 
Tel: (416) 223-8400 



page 12 TPUC magazine 



'"ff^r 



^\^ 




EUREKA! 



That's what we said when our new 

"invention'' solved all our VIC-20''' and 

Commodore-64^'' programming problems 



We had a problem. So we invented 
PC-DocuMate^" to solve it. The problem was 
how to quickly master the VIC-20 and 
CBM-64 keyboards and easily start pro- 
gramming in BASIC on our new personal 
computers. First we went through the 
manuals. 

INCONVENIENT MANUALS 

The user's guide was a nuisance and the 
programmer's reference manual was just 
plain inconvenient to use. We found the 
control key combinations confusing and the 
introduction to BASIC to be too "basic" for 
our needs. We needed a simple solution to 
our documentation problems. 

So we decided to surround the keyboard 
of each PC with the information we wanted. 
We decided to print whatever we needed on 
sturdy plastic templates which would fit the 
keyboard of either the VIC-20 or Commo- 
dore 64. 

SIMPLE SOLUTION 

This was the simple solution to our prob- 
lem. Now we could have the essential 
information right at our fingertips. 

On the left side and top of the templates 
we put BASIC functions, commands, and 
statements. On the lower left we used key 
symbols to remind us of how to use SHIFT, 
RUN/STOP, CTRL and the "Commodore" 
key. Over on the bottom right side we put 
some additional keys to help remember 
about CLR/HOME and RESTORE. But we 
were still a little confused. 

STILL CONFUSED 

We found we were confused about music 
programming, color graphics, and sprites. 
On both the VIC-20 and the CBM-64 tem- 
plates we carefully organized and summar- 
ized the essential reference data for music 
programming and put it across the top- 
showing notes and the scale. All those 
values you must POKE and where to POKE 
them are listed. 

Then to clarify color graphics we laid out 
screen memory maps showing character 
and color addresses in a screen matrix. (We 
got this idea from the manuals.) 

For the VIC-20 we added a complete 
memory address map for documenting 
where everything is in an expanded or 
unexpanded VIC. 



For the Commodore 64 we came up with 
a really clever summary table for showing 
almost everything you ever need to know for 
sprite graphics. 

GETTING EASIER 

Now we had organized the most essential 
information for our VIC and 64 in the most 
logical way. BASIC, music, color graphics, 
and sprites all seemed a lot easier. Our 
initial problem was solved by PC-Docu- 
Mate^r 

But we have a confession to make. 

WE CHEATED 

We had solved this kind of problem 
before. In fact, many times before. You see, 
we at SMA developed the original PC-Docu- 
Mate for the IBM PC. We've made templates 
for IBM BASIC and DOS, for WORDSTAR^^ 
VISICALC" and other best-selling software 
packages for the IBM PC. 

So we knew we could invent another 
PC-DocuMale^" to solve our problems with 
the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. Now our 
solution can be yours and you can join the 
thousands of satisfied users of our template 
products. 

Take advantage of our experience and 
success with PC-DocuMate templates. Get 
one for your personal computer. 

SOME SPECIFICS 

Our templates for the VIC and 64 are 
made from the same high quality non-glare 
plastic as the more expensive IBM PC 
versions. 

The templates are an attractive gray 
color and are imprinted with a special black 
ink which bonds permanently to the plastic. 
They are precision die-cut to fit your 
keyboard. 

Unlike some other products we've seen 
in this category, PC-DocuMate templates 
are professionally and expertly designed. 
And they are fully guaranteed. 



OUR GUARANTEE 

We guarantee your satisfaction. You must 
be satisfied with your PC-DocuMate for your 
ViC-20 or CBM-64. Try it for 10 days and if 
for any reason you are not satisfied return it 
to us (undamaged) for a full refund. No risk. 



SOLVE YOUR PROGRAMMING 
PROBLEMS WITH PC-DocuMate^" 

Order your PC-DocuMate today (by 
phone or mail) and solve your VIC-20 or 
CBM-64 programming problems. Send only 
$12.95 and specify which computer you 
have. We pay for shipping and handling. 
Use the coupon below or call 919-787-7703 
for faster service. 



YES! Please RUSH me VIC-20 

templates and/or CBM-64 tem- 
plates at $12.95 each. I have enclosed 

$ by: 

Check Money order MC/VISA 



Name 


Address 


City 


State 


Zip 


Card** 




Exp. 



Signature 
Foreign orders (except Canada) add $5.00 US 

Mail to: Systems Management Associates 

3700 Computer Drive, Dept. J 

P.O. Box 20025 

Raleigh. North Carolina 27619 



L. 



.J 



VIC-20 and Commodore 64 are trademarks of Commodore Busi- 
ness Machines, inc. 
Ad no. 731 Copyright 1983, SWA. 
Dealer inquiries invited. 



ROBOTS 

Jim Butterfield 

Toronto, Out. 

I must identify myself as a doubter. I 
know that small robots are within eco- 
nomic reach of the home, and they can 
talk, dance and beep appealingly. But 
I can't view them as a real happening 
until they can bring me breakfast in 
bed and wash the dishes afterwards. 

Yes, industrial robots are making new 
things possible, and changing manu- 
facturing economics. In some ways, this 
is happening in the home: for example, 
washing machines are becoming even 
greater marvels of technology. But we 
have this concept of a home robot: it 
will walk around, sweep the floors, feed 
the cat, sing a lullaby to the children, 
and deal a mean hand of poker. I don't 
believe it . . . yet. 

Industrial robots are rather dull things. 
They are bolted to the floor, and have 
little more to them than a very flexible 
arm. It may be interesting to see the 
arm being flexed in unusual ways 
(looking rather like a flamingo cran- 
ing its neck) and the speed at which it 
can move; it may be mentally challeng- 
ing to speculate on the effects that such 
machines have on the workplace. But 
they don't meet the image that has 
been built by the media. 

We'vc been bombarded with stories 
about robots that take over the world 
(for example, "R.U.R.", a play by Karel 
Capek which first used the word 'robot'). 
We remember robots that brew a fine 
bourbon (Robbie), robots that wag their 
tail (K9), and even robots that do a fair 
imitation of Stan Laurel and Oliver 
Hardy (R2D2 and C3P0). 

We know that they aren't ^'reaT' robots. 
Some are animated, some use radio 
control, and some have men inside. 
But they all plant the idea of what we 
expect a robot to be: something vaguely 
humanoid (or at least, life form) that 
has intelligence, self-awareness, and 
can save us lots of work. Isaac Asimov's 
robots even had a form of ethics: the 
three laws of robotics. 

It's fantasy, of course, and we should 
know better. But not having had expe- 



rience with real robots, we take much 
of our concepts from fiction. 

There are office robots. These are dif- 
ferent from industrial robots. Instead 
of being bolted to the floor, they can 
move around on wheels. They usually 
take their guidance from a wire in the 
floor or invisible paint. They can detect 
objects, and will stop if an obstacle is 
hit. Generally, they are used for tak- 
ing documents from office to office . . . 
an electronic "mail clerk". When this 
moving table stops in your area, run 
for it and get your messages; it won't 
wait there long. 

Similar machines are used to deliver 
sheets, blankets and similar materials 
between a laundry centre and hospital 
rooms. They are capable of boarding 
specially fitted elevators and selecting 
their destination floor. I haven't heard 
of comparable uses in hotels . . . yet. 

The most sophisticated "transport" 
robot is often not a robot at all. It's 
used in warehousing to store or fetch 
goods from a given storage slot. Such 
units are centrally directed; I find it 
hard to call them robots since they are 
not fitted with their ow^i "intelligence". 

What about the home? Yes, we can 
have robots that can walk (or roll) 
around based on stored instructions. 
There's been a toy ("Big Trak") avail- 
able for years that will do that. Yes, we 
can have robots that will talk; there 
are educational toys ("Speak and Spell") 
that will do that. But we find ourselves 
up against four limits: Limited intel- 
ligence; limited sensing; limited mo- 
bility; and limited strength. Until we 
can do something about these four, 
robots in the home may be more of an 
entertainment than a fact. 

Limited intelligence should be the easi- 
est problem to fix. We know how to 
write programs; we know how comput- 
ers work. Perhaps, however, we need a 
better language with which to instruct 
the computer; Basic is inflexible and 
slows and machine language is inflexi- 
ble and difficult for beginners 

Limited sensing will improve with time, 
at least in part. We know how to add 



temperature sensors or such things as 
sonar. It's somewhat harder to get a 
computer to recognize your voice, let 
alone detect what you're saying. And 
recognizing visual images is very hard 
— simple things like doors and win- 
dows are tough, and faces are almost 
impossible. I think we vvill need to set 
our goals carefully. 

Limited mobility depends on the en- 
vironment. Most robots can roll across 
a smooth floor without too much 
trouble. Butdifficult surfaces — ramps, 
or a lawn — are much tougher. And 
any robot that brings me breakfast in 
bed will need to be able to climb stairs, 
a far from trivial accomplishment- I 
sometimes wonder if a successful robot 
implementation will bring back the 
"dumb waiter" — a simple liftingdevice 
for transporting things between floors- 
Automated, of course. 

Limited strength is an engineering 
question. Greater strength requires 
larger motors, possibly hydraulics, and 
leads almost certainly to a heavier robot. 
Higher capacity batteries will be called 
for, and I have visions of such a robot 
turning into a tank. I'd hestitate to 
shake hands with a high power robot- - . 

Some of you may have watched "The 
Academy on Microcomputers", broad- 
cast weekly in Ontario. Jack Livesley 
and I shared the central set, and in 
episode 10 we decided to demonstrate 
robots. A Hero-I (Zenith/Heath) was 
selected, and trained to go through its 
paces. 

Here's how we had it planned: The 
robot would march in and announce 
itself at the appropriate point- I'd walk 
around it and point out some of the 
more interesting features, and then set 
it in motion again. It would rotate its 
head, wave its arm, open its "claw", 
and roll over to Jack. He, in turn, would 
put his script into the claw, which would 
promptly close. The robot would turn 
away, approach the camera, and sign 
off the show. 

For those of you who haven't seen the 
show, I should descibe the set- Jack 

continued on next page 



page 14 TPUG magazine 



and I sat in two small white swivel 
chairs. The Hero-I isn't very tall; it's 
about knee height. And it turns out 
that the Hero isn't very accurate about 
distance when rolling on carpet. 

Before the cameras started, we did a 
"walk through" to make sure that every- 
thing was OK. Hero performed per- 
fectly over the first part. When I set it 
in motion at the end, however, we had 
a small problem. The robot correctly 
swung its head, waved its arm, opened 



its claw, and then headed off in Jack's 
direction. The problem was that it mis- 
judged the distance; instead of stopping 
about a foot away from Jack, it kept 
going. 

Jack became alarmed. It's rather dis- 
concerting to be approached by a robot, 
complete with open claw, that doesn't 
want to stop. It doesn't help to know 
that the next thing that the robot is 
programmed to do, once it finally stops, 
is to close its claw. No harm was done. 



in fact; and I explained to Jack later 
that the limited strength of the Hcro-I 
would have ensured that it could only 
have given him a friendly nudge. Even 
so, he watched the robot very closely 
indeed when the cameras started roll- 
ing. 

I suspect that Jack Liveslcy is one of 
those people who will never have a 
robot in his home. TPUG 



.^^ 



^ .4:^ 



^ <,<> -^<^' 



z, 



^ 



CP 



^^ 



S 



e» 



S^ 



May 26 & 27, 1984 



Constellation Hotel 
Toronto, Ont. 

Check February TPUG Magazine 

or the Club Office 

for detailsl 




^REDUCES DISKETTE COST 50%l 

DOUBLES DISKETTE STORAGE SPACE ■ 



Owners of 5Va" ^single "read/write" head disk drives 
can imnnediately double diskette storage space by 
using XIUULE XinCM I ox 11. The back of a single sided 
diskette is burnished. To use it you need a 
"write enable notch," and sonne also need in 
addition, an "index hole." XimiE XIPTtU I and 11 
are precision engineered tools designed exclusively 
for this purpose. 

ximiE mncH i 

(Cuts square Write Enable Notch) For USers of Apple, Franklin, 

Atari, Commodore and most other soft sectored systems. 

only $14-95 each 
add $1.50 each P&H / ($4.50 foreign P&H) 

xnmiE mrF€H n 

(Cuts square Write Enable Notch and Va inch round "index hole") for 

owners of IBM, TRS 80 I & III, Osborne, Kaypro and others 
needing "index hole", and all other "hard sectored" systems. 

only $21 -90 each 

add $2.50 each P&H / ($6.50 each foreign P&H) 

^Florida Residents Add 5% Sales Tax* 

• IT'S A MONEY SAVER! • 




Dealer inquiries are invited. 



SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO: 



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ALL TrXoCMARKS ARE ACKNOWLEDQEO 



TPUG magazine page 15 



dealers mfiRK€TPU=IC€ 



^ 



This space 

could be 

advertising 

YOUR 
product 



Watch this space 
for monthly specials 

ELECROniC^ 
2001 LTD. 

5529 Yonge St, Toronto, Ontario 
M2N 533(416)223-8400 



Ridiculously Low Prices 
on Software 



MICROCOMPUTER 
COURSEWARE FOR 
COMMODORE AND APPLE 

Nursery school, kindergarten or re- 
tarded children. SHAPES discrimina- 
tion and numbers. Teacher authored. 
Can be used by disabled without a 
keyboard. 30 programs, task analysed. 
Fully tested, documented. May use Joy- 
stick and switch. Tracks student per-, 
formance. 

GRAND RIVER SOFTWARE, R.R. 
n%^ PARIS, ONTARIO, CANADA, 
NSL3ES. (519)442-7000 



COMMODORE SOFTWARE 
AFICIONADOS 

You'd like free software, we'd like 
reviews. The Book Company seeks 
additional reviewers for The Book of 
Commodore Software. For details, write 
and send a sample review to The Bouk 
Company, 1122'^ S. Hindry Ave., Lm 
Angcles/CA 30045 



^ 



WYCOR 

BUSINESS SYSTEMS 

MICHAEL K. BONNYCASTLE 

PRESIDENT 

170 The Donway West. Suite 401 
Toronto, Canada M3C 2G3 

Telephone: 
(416)444-3492 



^"^^ 



(S^ 



^ 



fj- 



J 



.^ 




Do you 

know the 

Commodore 64 

inside out and backwardsT 

Do you have a thorough mastery of 

BASIC? How about assembler? 

Umbrella Software needs people like you. Pro- 
grammers to help us create dynamic software. 
Software that is alive with graphics. Software that 
sings. Software that is beneficial. 

As well as working on our products, you may have 
a program you've already developed. We can 
publish it for you. 

USI is one of the largest Canadian software 
publishers. With over 50 products now on the 



PROGRAMMERS! 
WE WANT YOU! 



write programs 
for Umbrella 
Software 
Inc. 




market, we're solidly established and still 
growing. 

If you are interested in becoming part of the USI 
team, call or drop us a note outlining your 
knowledge and experience. And don't feel 
restricted to the Commodore 64. If you're familiar 
with other machines too, we'd like to know. 

^^^^ Product Development Dept. 

^^^ UmbreHa Software Inc, 

umbrella ^^ Bullock Drive, #5, 

soltiuare Markham, Ontario 

T^frtrnTORAiEC L3P3P2 (416)471-4311 



page 16 TPUC magazine 



Super PET COM munications $98.95 canadi 

(reg. $198.95) 



lan 



RS- 











8K of 6809 machine code 

50 to 19,200 Bits Per Second 

SuperPET (disk and screen) to 
HOST (IBM, DEC, HP, SUPERPET...) 



DISK RECORD (on/off any time) with 
block counting and screen display 



ALL DISK DRIVE Utilities 

FULLY SCREEN-MENU DRIVEN 
(user-friendly, error-proof] 



CUSTOMIZE YOUR OWN PETCOM 
Save any/all Menu selections 
create your versions 



83 PAGE USERS MANUAL 

(RS232C port, cabling hints, examples) 



f oonllor I — 



r oow.r-uD \ ■P^^'^^"^-^ 



SAVE CUSTOMISED PETCOM 



TT 



: I 

PETCOM BiKNER SCPEEM. 



BASIC j ^ ff I "'^ 






( PASCAL y-ji 



' l = 3y3(convh21 



( FORTRAN > ^^ 



TTT 



PETCOH COWTROl, 5CBEEW 



Ter-Blnal 

Floppy-to-Hoat 

List/Print 

Directory 

Rename 

Scratch 

Co^nd Dlalc 

Cult 



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TERMIK»L MODE 



(i>4- 



PLOPPlf-TO-HOST 



•STOP" 

I I 

VIEW/CHANGE DEFS'JL''-; -iCPrEH 







[1 







TERMINAL DEFAULT SETTINGS 



1 



'STOP' 



FLOPPT-TO-HOST DEFAULT SETTINGS 



LIST/PRINT DEFAULT SETTINGS 



' RUN/STOP' 

i 



'RUM/STOP' 
-A, 



CS>^ 



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DIRECTORT 



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COWMAHD DISH SCREEN 



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TPIJG magazine page 17 



SHARING PERIPHERALS 



Ron Byers 

Truro, Nova Scotia 

For those who would 'rather switch 
than fight' the following article will 
show how one may share a cassette 
drive or serial disk drive between iwo 
or more Commodore computers. If you 
have become a two computer family, 
or are working in a school situation 
where limited funds inspire you to try 
to get the maximum 'bytes per buck', 
the following circuits can provide a 
simple alternative to buying a sepa- 
rate memory storage device for each 
C-64, VIC 20 or PKT. 



C2N Sharing (See Fig.l) 

After a few weeks of manually connect- 
ing and disconnecting my one cassette 
drive first to my PET and then to my 
new C-64 w^henever I wished to load 
from or save to tape, I decided that a 
switch would be a much better solution. 
As the circuit drawing shows, the wires 
from the cassette unit are simply 
switched to the cassette port of the 
desired computer by the use of a me- 
chanical switch. This six-pole two posi- 
tion switch is not a commonly avail- 
able type however, so I will mention 
that I was able to obtain one from Cir- 
cuit Specialists Inc., P.O.Box 3047, 
Scottsdale, AZ, 85267 (part number 
10YX062). A cassette port connector 
which should be available from your 
Commodore dealer, (the number on 
mine is A-MP 530654-1 7831), some 
wire, a knob, and a small plastic box in 
which to mount the switch, are the 
other parts needed. Be sure to LABEL 
the top side of the cassette port connec- 
tor since it may not have a key on it to 
ensure that it will only go in the right 
way! The original wire and connector 
may be used to go on one of the com- 
puters if the wires are cut a few inches 
from the C2N unit and the switch is 
installed at that point. 

1541 Disk Drive Sharing ( See Fig.2) 

As the diagram shows, a very simple 
disk-share system to run three C-64 or 



VIC 20 computers from a single 1541 
disk drive can be quite easily built. 
Here again I have made use of a 
mechanical switch. The technicians in 
the group could no doubt quickly come 
up with a solid state switching arrange- 
ment to accomplish the task with a bit 
more finesse but, being a History major, 
I opted for the pragmatic solution. 
About eight of these are in use in our 
school system and they do the job quite 
nicely. 

The four-pole three position switch 
(#10YX043) may be obtained from the 
company mentioned in the previous 
section. If the 6 pin DIN connectors 
are unavailable locally, Addison Elec- 
tronics (8018, 20e Ave., Montreal, 



Pet, \iic ^ C6I« 



H1Z3S7) is a good source and has rib- 
bon cable, knobs and mini-boxes which 
are also needed to complete the project. 
If only two computers are to be used 
on one disk drive a four-pole two posi- 
tion switch may be substituted. A 
chassis-mount 6 pin connector on the 
switch box may be used instead of the 
arrangement shown in the diagram if 
the standard disk drive cable is used to 
connect the switch to the drive. 

While this system is a bit slow to use, 
because of the speed of the 1541, it 
does save the cost of two disk drives 
and lets you give more hands-on com- 
puter time to students for the money. 
TPUC 



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continued on next page 



page 18 TPUC magazine 



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TPUG magazine page J9 



CALENDAR OF TPUG EVENTS 



1984 Schedule 
THIRD ANNUAL TPUG CONFERENCE 

Saturday and Sunday, May 26th and 27th, 1984 

10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. 

Constellation Hotel, 900 Dixon Road 

(adjacent to the airport) 

Registration 

(prior to May 11) 

Member S25.00 

Spouse k children SIO.OO per person 

For 8-page Registration Package 

See February TPUG Magazine 

or Contact Club Office 

CENTRAL CHAPTER - Leaside High School, Bay view & 
Eglinton Aves. at 7 :30 p.m. in the auditorium for PET/CBM 
Wed. May 9 Wed. June 13 

VIC 20 CHAPTER -York Public library, 1745 Eglinton 
Ave. W., (just east of Dufferin) at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium 
Tue. May 1 Tue. June 5 

Commodore 64 CHAPTER - York Mills C.I., 490 York Mills 
Rd., (east of Bay view) at 7:30 p.m. in the cafetorium — Note: 
Changes in place and dates 

Mon. May 28 Mon. June 11 



WESTSIDE CHAPTER-Clarkson Secondary School, 
Bromsgrove just east of Winston Churchill Blvd. (south of 
the QEW) at 7:30 p.m. in the Little Theatre for PET/ 
CBM/VIC 20/Commodore 64 

Thu. May 17 Thu. June 21 

SuperPET CHAPTER — York University, Petrie Science 
Building, enter campus from Steeles Ave. — park in Lot D. 
Meet at 7:30 p.m. in front of Room 340. 
Wed. May 16 Wed. June 20 

COMMUNICATIONS GROUP - York Public Library, 1745 
Eglinton Ave. W., (just east of Dufferin) at 7:30 p.m. in the 
Story Book Room (adjacent to the auditorium). 
Wed. May 2 Wed. June 6 

COMAL GROUP -York Public Library, 1745 Eglinton 
Ave. W., (justeast of Dufferin) at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium 
Thu. May 31 Thu. June 28 

NEW GROUPS IN THE PLANNING STAGES 

Are you interested in being involved in a new chapter to the 
east end of Metro, north of Metro, northwest of Metro. . .(in 
short, somewhere in the Greater Toronto area) either as a 
participant or an organizer.^ Please let the club office know, 
by mail, phone, or TPUG bulletin board. 



TPUG Associate Club Chapter Meetings 



CANADA 

Edmonton Commodore Users Group 

— meets at Archbishop Jordan High School, Sherwood Park 
on the last Friday of each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Bob Kadylo 403-465-3523 

Guelph Computer Club 

— meets at Co-operators Insurance Assoc, on the 2nd 
Wednesday of each month at 7:30 p.m. 

Contact Brian Grime 519-822-4992 

London Commodore Users Club 

— meets at the University of Western Ontario, in Room 40 
of the School of Business Administration on the last Mon- 
day of each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Dennis Trankner 519-681-5059 

Sarnia C-64 Users Group 

— meets at Lambton College on the first Sunday of each 
month at 7:30 p.m. 

Contact J. C. HoUemans 519-542-4710 

Commodore Users Club of Sudbury 

— meets at Lasalle High School in the cafeteria on the last 
Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Tim Miner 705-566-9632 

PET Educators Group (Windsor) 

— meets at Windsor Separate School Board Media Centre, 
1485 Janette Ave. on the 3rd Wednesday of each month (not 



July & August) at 7:00 p.m. 
Contact John Moore 519-253-8658 

UNITED STATES 

Genesee County Area Pet Users Group (Michigan) 

— meets at Bentley High School on Belsay Rd. on the 3rd 
Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Gordon Hale 313-239-1366 

Michigan's Commodore 64 Users Group 

— meets at Warren Woods High School in Warren on the 
3rd Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Chuck Ciesliga 313-773-6302 

Sacramento Commodore Computer Club (California) 

— meets at SMUD Building Auditorium 6201 S St. on the 
4th Monday of each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Geoff Worstell 916-961-8699 

Southern Minnesota Commodore Users Group 

— meets at Mankato State University on the first Thursday 
of each month at 7:30 p.m. 

Contact Dean Otto 507-625-6942 

INTERNATIONAL 

Baden Computer Club 

— meets at CFB Baden-Soellingen on the 2nd Sunday of 
each month at 7:00 p.m. 

Contact Kevin Rowe 



page 20 TPUG magazine 



WRITE NOW! A Review 



Michael Quigley 

Vancouver, BC 

Note: This review is based on a system 
consisting of a VIC 20 expanded with two 
16K memory cartridges, a 1541 disk drive, 
C2N cassette, a Gemini- 10 printer, and a 
Cardco printer interface. 

Write Now! for the VIC (there is also a 
version for the 64) comes as a ROM 
cartridge which occupies Block 5 
(memory locations AOOO-BFFF). Unlike 
most cartridges in this locations, it is 
not auto-start, but initiated with a SYS 
command. This allows the possibility 
of returning to BASIC to perform vari- 
ous disk drive functions such as delet- 
ing or renaming files and validating 
the disk, which cannot be done from 
within the program itself. 

The cartridge comes with an impres- 
sive manual over 100 pages long, and 
an audio tape which is useful mainly 
for the beginning programmer as an 
introduction to word processing. Side 
one of my copy of this tape didn't seem 
to be recorded very well. It is possible 
to change the background color of Write 
Now!, usually the same color as the 
normal VIC. However, since the pro- 
gram uses printing in all the colors 
except white and yellow, the number 
of backgrounds available without con- 
flicting with screen messages is pretty 
limited. 

Though Write Now! is primarily a disk- 
drive based program it can be used 
with tape, even though this produces a 
few problems. When using an unex- 
panded VIC, or when attempting to 
load the next program by inputting 
only a return, there was no PRESS 
PLAY ON TAPE message. Under other 
circumstances, like when using the tape 
in conjunction with the disk drive, these 
messages not only appeared, but 
printed in multi-colors! Despite these 
problems, loads and saves were made, 
the latter one item after another, which 
requires considerable organizational 
skills. 

Among Write Now's features is the 
advertised claim that it "allows up to 
38k of text storage." This figure is at 
odds with its manual, which says "any 



combination of memory cartridges pro- 
viding up to 27k of additional mem- 
ory may be used . . . for a total of 28159 
characters in memory." (It should be 
noted that none of the Cardco expan- 
sion boards recognize the 3K expander.) 
Still — this is indeed more than any 
other VIC-20 word processor. 

One of the most positive features of 
Write Now! is that, unlike Quick Brown 
Fox, it allows full screen editing, though 
not in the same sense as RTC's VIC- 
Script. With Write Now!, the twelfth 
line from the top of the screen is the 
"cursor line" and text can be scrolled 
up or down to this point with the 
up/down cursor keys. Left and right 
cursor moves on this line are also 
possible, as is use of the INSERT/ 
DELETE key. There are a couple of 
unusual features. One is the optional 
use of a joystick to control the cursor 
which I thought stupid — is a joystick 
easier to manipulate than the cursor 
keys? The other is the fact that when- 
ever a key is pressed, a clicking noise 
like a typewriter is made (assuming 
you have the sound on), and various 
buzzes signal that something has been 
done incorrectly. This bit of feedback 
is a nice touch. 

There are so many features available 
with Write Now! that it's hard to know 
where to begin describing them. Most 
of its special commands are accessed 
either with the ViC's function keys fl 
to f8 or through use of numbers com- 
bined with either the CONTROL or 
COMMODORE keys. The RUN/ 
STOP key is used as a literal "escape" 
key. Pushing this allows you to return 
to your text from virtually any situation. 

The function keys are used to PRINT, 
SAVE, and LOAD. The first of these 
has an option menu with a wide vari- 
ety of choices, allowing control over 
all four margins on the printed page, 
as well as the page number, number of 
spaces between lines and whether or 
not line feeds are generated by the 
printer or the word processor. You 
can also start and stop printing at any 
page, which is handy if some minor 
correction has to be made, or if there is 
some problem like paper jamming. 



I was not too excited about the idea of 
having SAVE as function key f3 and 
LOAD as f4. It is quite possible to load 
in a large document, decide you don't 
want it, clear the text from memory, 
and then instead of LOADing (f4) a 
new file, accidentally push SAVE (f3), 
thus saving and replacing nothing 
under the old file name. Cardco could 
have endeavoured to make the pro- 
gram a bit more "idiot-proof" at this 
point. It is also possible to save new 
material under a file name which 
already exists, which will wipe out the 
old copy. The advice in the manual to 
back up everything extensively, not 
only on one, but more than one disk, 
should be well heeded. One positive 
feature of the SAVE and LOAD com- 
mands is you are allowed to merge 
files. 

Other function keys allow you to deter- 
mine how much memory space remains, 
and to instantaneously jump to the 
bottom of text. (The latter is used in 
conjunction with the HOME key, which 
jumps to the top.) Two keys are used 
for Dump Buffer and Clear Buffer, 
which the manual claims is useful for 
inserting text — up to 256 characters 
— at the beginning of long files. I found 
it handy for inserting short blocks of 
repeated text. 

Of the various functions accessed with 
the CONTROL and COMMODORE 
keys, the more important ones include 
Block Manipulation, Search, Replace, 
Tabs and Setting of Place Markers. 

Block Manipulation, which uses seven 
different keys to Mark Block Start, Mark 
Block End, Go to Block Start, Go to 
Block End, Copy Block, Delete Block, 
and Write Block, allows you to move 
around amounts of text of varying size. 
These commands are also handy for 
creating and inserting large sections 
of text in the absence of an Insert mode 
such as is found on Quick Brown Fox. 
With QBE, you can insert any amount 
of text up to the total memory remain- 
ing at any point in the text with a 
couple of keystrokes. The only way 
this could be done with Write Now! 



continued overleaf 



TPUG magazine page 21 



other than with Block Manipulation is 
through creating large blank spaces 
with the INSERT key and then typing 
in the new text. Write Block allows 
you to copy a block onto the disk under 
another file name- 
Write Now! has a global search and 
replace function, which is called merely 
"Replace." This allows either automatic 
replacement of one sequence of charac- 
ters for another, or a Yes/No choice of 
replacing or not and moving to the 
next sequence (if any) manually. The 
Replace function is very literal, replac- 
ing all upper and lower combinations 
of a particular sequence. For example, 
"AB" would replace "aB", "Ab", "ab" 
and "AB." Thus it is not very useful 
for replacing individual letters. It is 
also unable to replace the reverse E, 
produced by pushing the COMMO- 
DORE-E, and used as a printer "Escape 
Code" (more about this later) or the 
reverse left arrow, which appears when- 
ever a paragraph is terminated. This I 
found quite annoying. The only way 
to overcome this problem was to cre- 
ate a dummy combination like "QZ" 
to represent the unreplaceable char- 
acter, find it with the Search key (which 
requires you to push CONTROL- 
S/RETURN after each time a particu- 
lar character sequence is found) and 
replace each one manually. 

There are three keys devoted to tabu- 
lation which allow you to Set, Clear 
and Display tabs. Unfortunately, there 
is a problem created here since tabs 
can be established only on the cursor 
line, which is 22 characters long. Mak- 
ing a chart with tabs at character posi- 
tions 15, 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90 across the 
page, for example, would be possible 
only with a great deal of hassle. A bet- 
ter solution here with the Gemini 
printer is to establish the tabs with the 
sequence CHR$(68) + CHRf(TABl) + 
CHR$(TAB2) . . , etc., terminating this 
with CHR$(0). These tabs are then 
called by CHR$(9). Since it isn't possi- 
ble to put these ASCII codes directly 
into the text, they have to be converted 
to "redefinable characters", which are 
17 seldom-used keys like the up arrow, 
shifted plus sign, and so forth. Thus 
CHR$(9) could become the British 
pound sign, which when inserted in 
the text, would not be reproduced by 
the printer. This method works fine. 



The tab positions, which are moved to 
with the SHIFT/left arrow combina- 
tion, also cause a problem with para- 
graph indentations. These are created 
by the first tab position, usually four 
or five units from the left margin. When 
copy is justified so the left and right 
margins are aligned (Cardco calls this 
"fill justify"), Write Now! can put extra 
space between some words to fill out 
the line. It can also put extra spaces at 
the beginning of the line in the indent, 
with the result that the paragraph 
indentations do not line up on the page. 
Examples of this can be seen in the 
Write Now! manual. A solution to this 
problem is to redefine the space — 
CHRI(32) — as a character Such as an 
up arrow, and put four or five of these 
at the beginning of each paragraph. 
This assures that the indent space will 
be "fixed" and all indents line up. 

Some of the more esoteric CONTROL 
and COMMODORE commands are a 
non-destructive disk directory, a menu 
of options allowing you to change 
device numbers, a delete word key 
(unfortunately no delete sentence or 
paragraph), "up and down page" keys 
which move the text up and down a 
screen at a time, and a "Display File 
Position" key, which tells how many 
characters have been used up to that 
point. 

In order to take advantage of many 
advanced features of today's printers. 
Write Now! has adopted a system called 
"dot commands" to trigger functions 
in the printer like expanded or con- 
densed print, different pitches (num- 
bers of characters per inch), and so 
forth. Dot commands consistof a period 
followed by a two-letter code and pos- 
sibly other information, preceded and 
followed by a return. This informa- 
tion is not printed, nor does it cause an 
extra line feed. (It also makes it diffi- 
cult to print machine language instruc- 
tions which fall at the beginning of a 
line - i.e. .M,008D,008F.) There are 
24 dot commands in total. 
Some of these commands control vari- 
ous parameters established by the Print 
Menu, and even override those values, 
to the extent that the page can be up to 
250 characters wide and 254 lines long! 
Copy can be either "fill justified", left 
justifed (with a ragged right margin) 
or centered. You are also allowed the 



choice of an Arabic or Roman numeral 
page number and locating it in any 
column on the page. 

There are commands to advance the 
printer to the next page, to stop at the 
end of a page to insert a new sheet of 
paper and to stop the printer and 
change a daisy wheel or adjust switches. 
The last I found had a problem in that 
it did not reproduce the last line of a 
paragraph before stopping unless the 
secondary command was changed to 8 
in the Option Menu from its usual 7 
and the Print Menu line feeds option 
was turned on. 

This business of stopping the printer 
with a dot command is similar to 
another feature, the COMMODORE 
K, which stops the printer and allows 
you to type up to 18 characters, which 
are then inserted into the text, and the 
printer resumes following this insert. 
This is used in form letters where only 
things like the name, address, amount 
of money owed, etc., are different. 
However, there is no way the printer 
can stop in the middle of a line, so it 
stops at the end of a line above. Also, if 
you have two or more COMMODORE 
Ks in a line, you will have to remem- 
ber what they are. You cannot see the 
screen when they stop the printer. 

One of the more interesting dot com- 
mands is the Building Block. Using 
this allows you to call up a chunk of 
text stored on disk under a separate 
file name. This is then inserted and 
printed, and the original text resumes 
from the point following the Building 
Block command. In this way Cardco 
claims even the unexpanded VIC~20 
could construct a very long file, though 
I doubt many VIC users with a disk 
drive are using an unexpanded com- 
puter. The Building Blocks could not 
presumably be used with tape, since 
there is no way of returning to the 
original text. 

One dot command I didn't like was 
the Conditional Page. The idea with 
this is similar to Quick Brown Fox's 
"AP Style." This means that if there 
are 15 lines left on the page, and your 
next paragraph to be inserted there is 
18 lines long, it will be placed, un- 
broken, on the next page. With Write 



continued on next page 



page 22 TPUG magazine 



Now! I couldn't see how the number of 
lines per paragraph could be deter- 
mined ahead of time, since there is no 
way you can see where pages begin 
and end without printing them out. 

Another matter which is not handled 
very well is Headers, linesof text which 
can be placed on any line of the page, 
but are usually used as titles. Write 
Now! allows theuseof up toSheaders, 
but they are all flush left, with no 
options for putting them in the center 
or flush right. Thus, if I wanted to 
make a centered head like "WRITE 
NOW! REVIEW" over a text width of 
65 characters, I would have to define 
this header as 24 spaces followed by 
the title, or else re-establish the left 
margin. 

Using double-strike, emphasized and 
italic printing on the Gemini-10 posed 
no problem, and neither did super- 
and sub-scripts, though it should be 
noted that the commands in the man- 
ual to get out of super- and sub-script 
commands are incorrect. Not only do 
these modes have to be turned off, but 
double-strike print must be turned off 
as well. 



Most special printer features are ac- 
cessed with the COMMODORE E, 
which takes the value of CHRS(27), 
referred to as an "Escape Key". Use of 
the COMMODORE E insures that the 
"redefined" ASCII characters follow- 
ing it won't be printed. For example, 
to do underlining on the Gemini, you 
could convert the 1 to the British pound 
sign and the to the up arrow. The 
sequence to underline is then COM- 
MODORE E followed by dash (equiv- 
alent to ASCII CHRS(45)) plus pound 
sign, and to stop underlining, COM- 
MODORE E, dash, and up arrow. (This 
example in the manual — Figure 21 
on page A27 — of how to underline is 
incorrect.) 

It was with underlining that I found 
some problems with print-out when 
doing justified copy. Sometimes the 
right margin would not be lined up 
correctly. This anomaly can be seen 
on the first pages of the Write Now! 
manual, which was created with the 
cartridge and Cardco's own letter qual- 
ity printer. There were also peculiari- 
ties with the margin when redefined 
non-printing characters such as 
CHRS(145), used to switch to Upper 



Case, were inserted in a line. In short, 
if you want to get really fancy with 
Write Now!, be prepared to do a bit of 
experimentation with your printer- 
After all this, the question is: Is Write 
Now! the ultimate VIC-20 word pro- 
cessor? It lacks certain things like Quick 
Brown Fox's Send and Receive, to be 
used with modems, and one of my 
favorites, dotted tabs, which allow you 
to make the following easily: 

Item Price 

Still, despite these deficiencies and the 
few bugs I found. Write Now! contains 
many features, some of them NOT 
found with QBE (especially the "full- 
screen" editor), which will please even 
the most creative programmers. One 
of these, which I've saved for last, is 
the ability to print files from other 
word processors, among them Vic 
Typewriter (Commodore), VIC-Script 
(RTC) and Word Pro, after a bit of 
editing to remove unusual commands. 

As far as I am concerned, this alone 
makes Write Now! worth obtain- 
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TPUG magazine page 23 



HESW RITER 

Michael Quigley 
Vancouver, BC 

Although HesWriter was one of the 
first "serious" word processors for the 
VIC 20, it suffers by comparison with 
more recent software in the same field, 
notably Quick Brown Fox and Write 
Now! Still, HesWriter has occupied a 
high position on some "top ten" lists of 
VIC software, and as such deserves 
comment. 

Two important features to look for with 
a word processor are the ability to access 
text and the ability to manipulate this 
text easily. In both these areas, Hes- 
Writer is disappointing- 

The maximum length of a HesWriter 
line is 18 characters. There is word 
wrap, which moves words which won't 
fit at the end of one line, unbroken, to 
the beginning of the next line. Copy is 
entered a line at a time, and it is not 
possible to edit lines above the one 
you are currently working on. In order 
to make changes to text above the 
"cursor line", you have to enter the 
Edit Mode, where alterations can be 
made only with some difficulty. 

For example, if you want to insert a lot 
of material in the middle of a pre- 
viously typed line, you have to first 
determine the number of this line by 
entering the Number Mode, somehow 
retaining the number (how? with a 
pencil?), then create the new text else- 
where, insert it before the line in which 
you want to insert it, and then delete 
any extraneous words. If this sounds 
confusing, believe me, it is. Further- 
more, when inserts and edits are made 
in this way, extra spaces are sometimes 
created which are printed out along 
with the text. It's also possible to find 
yourself in editing situations where 
copy is frozen and nothing further can 
be inserted without going through vari- 
ants on the above procedure. Deleting 
lines or copying lines from one loca- 
tion to another are both handled in a 
similar manner, and returning to the 
main Entry Mode sometimes leaves 
you with no copy on screen to refer to. 

HesWriter does work quite well with 
fairly simple projects which don't 



require any fancy formatting. It is also 
well suited to slow, careful typists. I 
found that when typing fast, the cur- 
sor had trouble keeping up to me. This 
proved annoying when the cursor 
dropped to the line below, revealing 
"hidden" errors at the end of the one 
above (which, of course, couldn't be 
corrected except by going through the 
odious business above). 

HesWriter is also best suited to use 
with low-cost printers like the VIC-1525, 
since it has no provision to use fea- 
tures like italics, condensed print, 
superscript, and so forth. In fact, it 
won't even access the expanded print 
on the VIC printer, created with 
CHR$(14)! I found printing with Hes- 
Writer proceeded at a slow but accept- 
able pace highly reminiscent of some 
BASIC word processors, a similarity 
which was enforced by BASIC error 
messages in other parts of the program. 

There are various format commands 
in HesWriter designed to determine 
the four margins of the printed page, 
spaces between lines, position of head- 
ers (titles), and the use of centred or 
justified copy (the latter with aligned 
margins). Not all of these worked with 
my Gemini-10 printer and Cardco inter- 
face combination and I couldn't deter- 
mine if this was because of the printer 
or because I wasn't using acceptable 
values in these commands. There are 
usually no minimum values established 
in the manual. A value of "0" for the 
left margin produced erratic results in 
printout, for example. 

HesWriter saves to tape or disk and 
allows you to change screen and letter- 
ing colors. You can also preview text 
before it is sent to the printer and chain 
files together to make long documents. 
There is a "search" mode, which does 
not work very well — some instances 
of a given sequence were bypassed. 
Among the things you can 7iot do is 
access the disk directory or other func- 
tions like Scratch and Validate. 

The shifted space in HesWriter 
(CHRS(160), which is used as a "fixed 
space", causes problems with non- 
Commodore printers where this is a 



printing graphic character. With my 
Gemini 10, I had to adjust one of the 
dip switches on the back to clear this 
up. As well, HesWriter places a dou- 
ble space after each sentence when print- 
ing out. This is the procedure we were 
all taught to do in high school typing 
class, but it may not always be desirable, 
and it is not possible to disable this 
feature. 

HesWriter is a world unto itself as far 
as compatibility with other word pro- 
cessors is concerned. It saves programs 
on disk as sequential files, which means 
it's not possible to load in material 
from most major word processors, 
which save to disk with program files. 
Even loading from Totl.Text, which 
also saves sequentially, proved fruitless, 
since its files are created by a different 
method. Tape files were also incom- 
patible. 

In short, at a price roughly equivalent 
to that of Cardco's Write Now!, which 
offers many more features and consid- 
erable versatility in manipulating copy, 
HesWriter does not have a great deal 
to offer. One would hope, in fact, that 
HesWare would issue a revised ver- 
sion of HesWriter for the VIC 20 incor- 
porating features such as found in more 
recent word processors and which was 
the equal of their high-quality games 
and other products. TPUC 



Important message 
to all bbs users. 

The TPUG BBS has a new 

telephone number and 

new hours. 

The new number is. , . 

(416)429-6044. 

The new operating hours are. . . 

24 hours per day. 

7 days per week. 

The new password is. . . 

daffodil 



page 24 TPUG magazine 




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pdge 26 TPUG magazine 



Forecasting With the 8032 - part i 



John Shepherd 

Islington, Ontario 

A forecast is a prediction of future 
events. Its purpose is to reduce uncer- 
tainty and risk in decision making. 
We can expect that all forecasts will 
usually have some error, but that the 
forecasting method used can determine 
the amount of error to be expected. 
The most sophisticated and expensive 
techniques cannot reduce average fore- 
cast error below a certain level, and 
therefore cannot eliminate uncertainty. 

Because of the large fluctuations that 
we have seen recently in the economy, 
accurate forecasts are becoming even 
more important in all phases of busi- 
ness planning. Governments, corpora- 
tions and institutions try to make fore- 
casts with varying degrees of success. 
Despite considerable talk about tech- 
nique, forecasting is more of an art 
than a science in most organizations. 
Judgemental approaches are most often 
used, even though time series meth- 
ods have been shown to give more accu- 
rate forecasts. 

The TPUG February 1984 PET disk, 
(P)T6, contains four programs which 
can be used to project historical data 
into the future. These articles supple- 
ment the documentation on the disk 
and explain how to use the programs 
in practical forecasting applications in 
the most effective way. 

The programs permit the entry and 
sequential storage of historical data 
for up to 100 prior time periods. This 
data can then be put into various 
mathematical forecasting models, to 
generate forecasts for any number of 
time periods ahead. If there is suffi- 
cient data, forecasts are simulated for 
prior periods and compared to the 
actual data for those periods. We can 
estimate how accurate our future fore- 
casts will be from the forecast error of 
this prior simulation. 

A time series is a sequence of observa- 
tions of demand at equally spaced dis- 
crete time points. Time series analysis 
uses only the time series history of 
demand in order to develop a model 
for predicting future values. The logic 



is clearly stated and the operations are 
mathematical. Such a statistical fore- 
cast is often evaluated subsequently 
by an informed user, who may modify 
it subjectively in view of other infor- 
mation and his perceptions of the 
future. 

All time series forecasts are based on 

two critical assumptions: 

(l)data in the past exhibited some sort 

of pattern, and 

(2) data in the future will behave, at 

least to some extent, as it has in the 

past. 

It is most important to examine each 
forecasting situation to determine 
whether these two assumptions hold 
true. For example, stock market prices 
may possibly exhibit some sort of his- 
torical pattern. Numerous studies, 
however, have shown that their move- 
ment is random. Therefore, time series 
methods cannot be used reliably to 
forecast stock prices. On the other hand, 
experience shows that time series fore- 
casting techniques can provide useful 
forecasts of the demand for goods and 
services. 

Before we use the programs, we will 
have to define some of the terminol- 
ogy used. 

Demand is the word used to describe 
the data being forecasted. Demand 
could be sales, price levels, usage, 
withdrawals, dollars, units, etc., de- 
pending upon the particular applica- 
tion. 

The forecasting period is the basic unit 
of time for which data is available and 
for which forecasts are prepared. For 
example if we are forecasting monthly 
sales, the forecasting period is one 
month. 

Forecast error is defined as the actual 
data for the period, less the forecast 
that was made for that period. Yor 
example, if June sales were forecasted 
to be 600 units but actually were 520 
units, the forecast error for June was 
— 80 units. A forecaster should continu- 
ally monitor forecast error so that if it 
becomes larger than expected, this may 
be a signal to adjust the forecast model 
used. A graph of forecast error against 



time will often indicate whether another 
model might be more appropriate. 

Three measures of average forecast 
error are used in the programs. M.A.D. 
is the mean absolute deviation, and is 
the arithmetic average of the absolute 
values of the errors. M.S.E. is the mean 
squared error, which is used to calcu- 
late the Standard Deviation of Fore- 
cast Error. The most probable estimate 
of actual demand is the forecast, how- 
ever only rarely does demand exactly 
equal forecast. It can be anticipated 
that 67% of the time actual demand 
will fall within plus or minus one stan- 
dard deviation of forecast error, and 
95% of the time it will fall within plus 
or minus two standard deviations. 

The forecast lead time is the number 
of forecasting periods between the most 
recently available data and the period 
for which we wish to develop a forecast. 
For example, if we receive March sales 
figures in mid April, they can be 
included with the earlier historical data 
to forecast sales for April, May, or even 
say, September. In such a case, the 
lead times would be one, two and six 
months. Obviously, the longer the lead 
time, the greater the expected forecast 
error. As will be shown in subsequent 
articles, the lead time influences the 
choice of forecast model. "Immediate" 
forecasts have a lead time of less than 
one month, ''short term" forecasts 1 to 
3 months, "medium term" 3 months to 
2 years, and "long term" over 2 years. 

Seasonality is a cyclical pattern in the 
data that seems to repeat itself every 
"n" periods. For example, monthly data 
often has a seasonality of 12, or quar- 
terly data a seasonality of 4. Some of 
the programs calculate seasonality 
factors. These factors are divided into 
the data to produce seasonally adjusted 
data. The model then forecasts this 
seasonally adjusted data, and then mul- 
tiplies the results by the factors to pro- 
duce the forecast. It will be shown in a 
later article how these factors are calcu- 
lated to total "n". 

The programs are entirely in BASIC 



continued overleaf 



TPUG magcaine page 27 



and should run on any PET, however 
the graph routines are specific for the 
8032. Some of the linear models are 
solved by the inversion of rather large 
matrices, and unfortunately can take 
10 or 15 minutes to run. The algebraic 
theory and equations involved are cov- 



ered in most elementary forecasting 
texts. 

In the next article we will look at the 
first of these programs, ''forest data. 8". 
This program accepts and files the his- 
torical data that we wish to project 



into the future. It permits additions, 
replacements and corrections and 
allows us to print and display the data 
in gi^aphical form. Other programs then 
take this data and use it to make the 
forecasts. TPUG 



Curing the Single-Floppy Bug 



David Williams 

Toronto, Ont. 

In the March/April, 1984, issue of 
TPUG Magazine, I wrote about some 
errors which occur when Commodore 
single disk drives, such as the 2031 and 
1541, are used to handle relative files. 
At that time, I could say little more 
than that the problem is a difficult 
one, and I asked if any readers could 
give us advice on how to use relative 
files reliably on single drives. Now, as 
a result of further experiments, I think 
I have found an empirical "fix" which 
always seems to work. However it has 
the disadvantage of being extremely 
slow, so there is still plenty of room for 
advice on how it might be improved. 

If you are interested in seeing these 
bugs in action, try the following ex- 
periment. (I will assume that you know 
how to handle relative files from 
BASIC. If you don't, this article is 
probably not for you.) Write a pro- 
gram which sets up a file which will 
occupy several disk blocks. Fifty re- 
cords, twenty characters in length, is a 
good choice. Create the entire file by 
doing a dummy PRINT# into its last 
record, then start filling the records, 
one character at a time. Print into the 
first byte of the first record, then to its 
second byte, and so on until the record 
is full. Do the same to the second record, 
and continue this way until the file is 
full. Then go back to the beginning 
and read everything back, counting 
the errors. Try not to lose count! 

There are several theories as to what is 
going wrong. In fact, there may well 
be at least two different bugs, one of 
which can be fixed by using Jim But- 
terfield's suggestion of always sending 



the positioning command to the disk 
drive twice, whenever it is needed. This 
helps greatly, but does not solve all of 
the problems. At present, Jim's favour- 
ite theory about the second bug is that 
something is amiss with the "queueing" 
system by which the disk drive stores 
requests from the computer. When the 
computer sends a series of disk com- 
mands faster than the drive can deal 
with them, they are supposed to be 
kept in the drive's memory and ser- 
viced in the correct order. Maybe, 
somehow, the requests get into the 
wrong order, or maybe the queue mem- 
ory can sometimes overflow, or maybe 
the drive sometimes fails to signal to 
the computer that it should pause for a 
while, to allow the drive time to catch 
up. There are many possibilities. 

In my experiments, I have been in the 
habit of always duplicating the posi- 
tioning commands, so I have not seen 
any problems which would be cured 
by doing this. I have never found any 
problem when reading files. The diffi- 
culties always arise while files are being- 
written, and usually when the record 
being written is one which crosses a 
block boundary on the disk. This find- 
ing supports the idea that the bug has 
something to do with the request 
queueing system, since writing to re- 
cords, especially to those on block 
boundaries, is a much slower process 
than reading them. 

The "fix" I have found consists simply 
of being very patient. Put long delays 
into the program, so that it sends disk 
commands so infrequently that there 
is never a chance for a queue to form. 
The delays have to be especially long 
after PRINT# commands, before the 



next positioningcommands are sent. I 
have found situations in which delays 
as long as two seconds are required. 

Unfortunately, I have not yet been able 
to find a universally applicable way in 
which the computer can reliably tell 
whether the drive is writing on a block 
boundary, and thus whether the long 
delays are needed. I have therefore 
had to put the delays in anyway, whe- 
ther they are needed or not. I have 
also found that delays are sometimes 
needed following positioning com- 
mands, before the next PRINT# state- 
ments, but that these delays can be 
much shorter — a few tenths of a sec- 
ond at the most. 

These delays have the unwanted effect 
of making relative-file-handling pro- 
grams very slow, but they do make 
them reliable. The situation seems to 
be one in which a certain amount of 
trial and error is required to discover 
how long the delays must be in a given 
program. Many programs seem to work 
quite reliably without any delays at 
all. Obviously some experimentation 
(with frequent use of backup disks!) 
must be part of the life of anyone who 
would use relative files on single disk 
drives. 

The rest of this article will be of inter- 
est only to people who use programs 
written in BASIC 4.0 on PET/CBM 
computers. I have developed a little 
machine language routine which causes 
the PET automatically to insert pauses 
when writing to relative files and to 
duplicate RECORD commands, so that 
it handles these files reliably on the 
2031 disk drive. A similar routine could 
probably be written for Commodore 
continued on next page 



page 28 TPUG magazine 



64's which use BASIC 4.0 disk com- 
mands as parts of various add-on pack- 
ages, but different versions would have 
to be used for the Buscard, the Link, 
etc. 

Incidentally, I should mention that 
there seems to be no difference, in this 
respect, between the recent "skinny" 
203rs and the older "fat" model. There 
is a myth that the "fat" 2031 is just like 
half a 4040. 1 wish this myth were true. 
I own one of them. Unfortunately, as 
far as its internal logic is concerned, 
this drive seems to be essentially the 
same as the more recent single drives, 
and definitely not like the 4040. 

Since this article is intended for BASIC 
users, rather than for machine language 
fiends, the version of the routine shown 
in the listing requires no knowledge 
of machine language or of the PET's 
inbuilt monitor. It is a simple BASIC 
program which writes a disk file con- 
taining the machine language routine. 
Just type in this program, making espe- 
cially sure that you get the punctua- 
tion right in the OPEN statement in 
line 210 and that the numbers in the 
DATA statements are correct. Put a 
disk into the drive and run the program. 
It will write the file to the disk. Run 
the BASIC program repeatedly on all 
the disks you have which carry pro- 
grams which handle relative files. 

Two lines must be added to each file- 
handling program: 

10 IF F=0 THEN F=1:L0AD ''2031 
RELFIXML.D",8 

20CLR:SYS634 



The line numbers are unimportant, 
but these must be the first two lines 
executed by the program. 

That's all there is to it! The BASIC 4.0 
file-handling program will now dupli- 
cate all RECORD commands and insert 
delays where appropriate. As the rou- 
tine stands, the "long" delays (between 
PRINT# statements and subsequent 
RECORD commands) will be of about 
two seconds and the shorter ones about 
a third of a second. However, it is pos- 
sible to adjust the "long" delays by 
POKEing address 819, after the machine 
language is loaded, with any number 
from one to twelve. (As the routine 
stands, this address contains a six — the 
last number in the DATA statements.) 
A one will reduce the delays to about a 
third of a second. Twelve will increase 
them to about four seconds. I suggest 
that you use the smallest number which 
you find works reliably with the pro- 
gram you are using. 

Two cautions are in order. The machine 
language occupies almost all of the 
first cassette buffer. This precludes its 
use with any other program which uses 
this buffer. The routine may also prove 
not to work with other programs which 
patch into the BASIC interpreter, such 
as utilities which add words to the 
language. In practice, these restrictions 
are slight. The routine will almost 
always work properly. 



100 rem 2031 rel-file fix writer 

110 rem david williams, 1984 

120 : 

130 rem sys 634 to enable resulting 

140 rem m/1 program, when loaded. 

150: 

160for i = l to 188 

170 read a:xS = xS-hchrS(a):c=c-ha: 

d=d-hc 
180 next 
190 if c=18605 and d = 1866576 then 

210 
200 print "error in data statements":stop 
210dclose:open 1,8,5,"0:2031 relfix 

ml.d,p,w" 
220 if ds then print dsS:dclose:stop 
230print#l,xS; 
240 close 1 
250 end 
260: 

1000 data 122,2,169,76,133,112,169,135 

1001 data 133,113,169,2,133,114,96,230 

1002 data 119,208,2,230,120,138,72,152 

1003 data 72,162,0,161,119,201,207,240 

1004 data 4,201,152,208,58,168,165,120 

1005 data 201,4,176,5,202,228,55,208 

1006 data 46,192,152,240,49,72,165,119 

1007 data 72,173,47,3,240,16,32,33 

1008 data 3,144,6,173,51,3,32,1 

1009 data 3,169,0,141,47,3,32,135 

1010 data 2,32,156,255,169,20,32,17 

1011 data 3,104,133,119,104,133,120, 

104 

1012 data 168,104,170,76,118,0,173,47 

1013 data 3,208,15,32,33,3,144,5 

1014 data 169,1,32,1,3,169,1,141 

1015 data 47,3,173,51,3,10,10,109 

1016 data 51,3,10,10,32,17,3,48 

1017 data 214,56,160,0,162,0,202,208 

1018 data 253,136,208,250,233,1,208, 

246 

1019 data 96,24,162,2,120,117,141,157 

1020 data 48,3,169,0,202,16,246,88 

1021 data 96,56,162,2,120,189,48,3 

1022 data 245,141,202,16,248,88,96,0 

1023 data 0,0,0,6 



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page SO TPUC magazine 



Machine Language For Beginners - A Review 



Ian Wright 
Toronto, OnL 

Richard MausficUl: MACIrllNE LAN- 
ai'A Gl-: tOR nEGINNERS^from COM- 
RUlli! Hooks, a division oj Smad Systems 
Services Ltd., Greensboro, North Carolina. 
350 pau-es, spiral bound, desunied as an 
introduction to 6602 programming in 
machine language Jor the Atari, VIC 20, 
PET CUM, Commodore 64 and Apple 
personal computers. SI9.95 Cdn. 

At the recent Computer Fair held at 
the Toronto International Centre, I 
purchased a copy of this new book on 
machine language. I have long been a 
subscriber to COMPUTE! magazine, 
and admire the writing of Richard 
Mansfield, the senior editor. I was not 
impressed, however, with this book. 

Let me begin by stating that I am indeed 
a beginner in machine language and I 
would appreciate a good introduction 
to machine language programming. 
Any prior knowledge I have has come 
from reading various magazines. The 
text says. . . 

"This book only assumes a working knowl- 
edge of BASIC. It was designed lo speak 
directly to the amateur programmer, the 
part-time computerist. It should help you 
make the transition to machine language 
with relative ease." 

Unfortunately, the book puts a num- 
ber of major obstacles in the begin- 
ner's way. The first, and most annoy- 
ing, is that the text is written for "all" 
6502 processors. Although there are 
some similarities between the Apple 
and Commodore machines, the Atari 
requires constant changes to the text. 
It is distracting to read about an instruc- 
tion, and then find that it applies only 
to the Atari. 

The book contains 147 pages of text, 
and then 190 pages of appendices! I 
have the impression that the publish- 
ers w^anted to fill space by providing 
Micromon, Supermon4, Micromon 
Plus, VIC Micromon, Supermon64, and 
The Wedge. All of these programs are 
documented and a full listing is pro- 
vided for each. This is in addition to 
listings of a simple assembler and 



disassembler in BASIC- Surely the ref- 
erence to the appropriate issue of 
COMPUTE! such as that given on page 
31 would suffice. I also have the impres- 
sion that the book has been collated 
from previous printings because some 
of the appendices that provide mem- 
ory maps are vertical, while others are 
printed horizontally (i.e turn the page 
sideways to read them). 

According to the author, the first step 
in using the book is to type in the 
'Simple Assembler' that is provided in 
appendix C. This program uses an arbi- 
trary selection of decimal or hex for- 
mat, no commas, and some simple 
opcodes. The provision of an easy 
assembler is a useful idea, but the 
author does not use this assembler in 
his coding! Pages 20-22 demonstrate 
the difference between simple and 
deluxe assemblies. The remainder of 
the text uses "full" or deluxe assem- 
blies. This would be very confusing to 
any beginner with no understanding 
of the use of labels. More confusion 
results because you could not use these 
examples with the simple assembler 
anyway. 

To provide examples that can be ap- 
plied to the PET, VIC, C-64, Apple, 
and Atari, Mr. Mansfield uses imagi- 
nary addresses e.g. 1000 STA S8000. 
The location S8000 is not a 'real' address 
and in order to type this in to my PET 
I have to find a "safe" memory loca- 
tion, and provide the correct address- 
es. Part of being a novice is that I do 
not know these things and the instruc- 
tions are hidden at the bottom of page 
one as part of the instructions to the 
"Simple Assembler". To quote Mans- 
field: 

". . . it makes no difference whether a 
machine language program starts at address 
1000 or 0340 as long as you are putting it in 
a safe memory zone." 

This may be true, but it adds to the 
confusion when you have to give branch 
addresses. Similarly, we are told not 
to store machine language programs 
in zero page. Zero page addressing is 
talked about later in the book, but with- 



out explaining where we can save mate- 
rial in zero page. I think some specific 
examples should be provided on each 
machine for various instructions. 

I had my hopes raised by an "Exam- 
ples and Practice" drill for hex-decimal 
conversion. At last, someone is going 
to provide examples and DRILLS on 
machine coding. No way! That is the 
only drill in the book. 

Mr. Mansfield should hire another edi- 
tor to proofread his work. There are a 
number of significant typos . . . e.g. 
the entire table in appendix E has the 
most significant and least significant 
byte sub-titles reversed. As a beginner, 
I found these kinds of errors to be real 
stumbling blocks to understanding. 

This book is a step in the right direc- 
tion. There is a need for a well-written 
tutorial on 6502 machine language that 
can take a beginner through simple 
coding that can replace slow basic rou- 
tines. This book could be considered 
as the best of a very poor bunch. I like 
the explanations of why some instruc- 
tions are more useful than others, but 
there is not enough explanation of some 
of the opcodes. I particularly like the 
"dictionary" of machine language 
equivalents to BASIC commands. Using 
this feature I can look up ON GOSUB 
and find out one way to code it in 
machine language. 

I feel that Mr. Mansfield should pro- 
duce a revised version of this book 
leaving out the extraneous appendi- 
ces, and adding more examples and 
drill exercises. A flow chart with a struc- 
ture leading from the simple to the 
more complex instructions should be 
part of the planning before this new 
version is written. There is a need for 
a more structured approach to teach- 
ing this subject. lyilG 



TPUG magazine page SI 



TORONTO PET USERS GROUP INC. 

(the world's largest independent Commodore 
computer users' group) 

presents the 



THIRD ANNUAL TPUG CONFERENCE 



Saturday and Sunday, May 26th and 27th, 1984 

10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. 

at the 

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900 Dixon Road (adjacent to airport) Toronto 

For 8~page Registration Package 

See Febi-uary TPUG Magazine 

or Contact Club Office 



Speakers — Choose from 66 hourly sessions 

Hear — Jim Butterfield, Hal Chamberlin, Paul Higginbottom 

Len Lindsay, Steve Punter, Jim Strasma, Don Whitewood 



Register for one of our full-day sessions: 
Sat. — Introduction to BASIC programming 
Sun. — Introduction to machine language 



FLASH! — two additional speakers will make presentations 
at 10:00 a.m. 



LOREN WRIGHT, 

author, consultant 



Sat. — C-64 Graphics; A Little Machine language Goes a 
Long Way 

Fine scrolling and split screens are made possible. 
Color changes, quick screen changes, and screen saving 
are all much faster. (Level: Intermediate/Advanced) 

Sun. — Sprite Programming Techniques 
Brief review of essentials, then mostly animation, 
superposition, multicolor, how to switch banks, etc. 
(Level: Intermediate) 



D IGNAZIO 



^%^ ^T^r 



Sat. k SunX^O/' ^Ofy ' • . ^%ed 



^<fs 



'^^/ 



^ 



Answer Room — Book an appointment with an expert for 5 
to 10 minutesof help with your problem. Participants include 
all the club librarians, many of the session speakers, and 
other knowledgeable members of the club. 

Dealer Display — We expect over 40 dealers with products 
related to Commodore computers to be at the conference. 
Here's your chance to browse at your leisure and see just 
what is available for your computer. 

MANY DISKS AND TAPES FOR THE COMMODORE 
64, VIC 20, PET, SUPERPET, AND COMMODORE EDU- 
CATIONAL SOFTWARE LIBRARIES WILL BE AVAIL- 
ABLE AT THE CONFERENCE. TO GUARANTEE 
AVAILABILITY, USE THE PRE-ORDER FORM 
SUPPLIED TO REGISTRANTS. 

Disks — in 4040 format will be available at the special price 
of $4.00 each. Disks, in 8050 format, will be available (only 
by pre-order) at the special price of S6.00 each. Each confer- 
ence registrant receives a form for pre-ordering disks. Disks 
in 4040 format only will be available at the Conference on a 
"pay and carry" basis, but availability of any particular disk 
can not be guaranteed. 



Tapes — from the Commodore 64 and VIC 20 libraries will 
be available at the special price of $4.00 each. Tapes for the 
PET and Commodore Educational Software libraries will 
be available by pre-order only at S6.00 each. Each confer- 
ence registrant receives an order form for pre-ordering 
tapes. Tapes for the Commodore 64 and VIC 20 libraries will 
be available at the Conference on a "pay and carry'' basis, but 
availability of any particular tape cannot be guaranteed. 

Note: There will be additional new disks for the Commodore 
64 advertised and available at the Conference. This applies 
particularly to the new "M" series. 

continued on next page 



page 32 TPUG magazine 



Tired of shooting down aliens from the Planet Mongo? 

Is your old cassette drive gathering dust? 

Have all your upgrades and add-ons taken over more 

than their 

fair share of your living space? 

Would you rather have cash than the world's largest 

collection 

of computer paraphenalia? 

HELP IS HERE!!!!!! 



Bring your surplus computer hardware, software, 
cables, books or w^hatever to the 

TRADERS' CORNER 



at the TPUG Annual Conference. 
For a small commission, TPUG will display your 
computer-related goods for sale on the Dealer's Floor. 

Lots of deals went down last year, so don't lose out. 
Call the TPUG Office at 782-9252 for more information. 



Banquet (optional) — For S25 per person, you can have din- 
ner with the speakers, Board of Directors of the club, and 
members of the Conference Committee and get to know 
other members from near and far a little better. Rather than 
have a main banquet speaker, we intend to have a number 
of people participate including Jim Butterfield, Lyman 
Duggan, Karl Hildon, Fred Dlgnazio. Won't you join us 
while we let our hair down a little and enjoy ourselves. 

Spouse's Program (optional) — If your spouse isn't interested 
in attending the Conference perhaps (s)he would enjoy a 
trip to Ontario Place and/or the Science Centre. Ontario 
Place is a popular waterfront amusement centre. Features 
are the informative Tuture Pod', live entertainment at 'The 
Forum', The Cinesphere, and an exciting display area 'Ontario 
North Now'. All these are included with admission. The 
Science Centre has many displays showing the principles 
behind today's technology. The method is Touch, Look, 
Listen'. One day isn't enough to see it all, but you can try. 
Cost is SIO per person per day and includes transportation 
and admission. Food and souvenirs are extra. 



Do you want to attend the Conference free? — Then volun- 
teer to work for a day. You can volunteer to work half a day 
on Saturday and half a day on Sunday, or all of either day. 
Specifically, we are looking for Room Monitors. These peo- 
ple will be in charge of seeing that the people coming to a 
specific session are registered for that session, seeing that 
the appropriate equipment is available for the session, proba- 
bly be asked to fill in a report sheet on the session etc. In 
short, he/she will be in charge of the room and seeing that 
all runs smoothly. Volunteer to the club office, by mail, 
telephone or BBS. You will need to pay for your registration. 
A refund will be provided after the Conference. 

Do you have a specific area of computer expertise? — and 

would you be willing to be available to answer some ques- 
tions for an hour or two in the Answer Room at the Conference? 
If so, please contact Rosemary Beasley c/o the club office by 
mail, telephone or BBS. TPUG 



Pre-registrations will be accepted prior to May 1 1 

Member $25.00. Spouse &; children $10.00 per person 

Non-members must pay appropriate membership fee 
plus the member registration fee of $25.00 

After May 11, registration will only be accepted at the 
door on a first-come, first-served basis 



TPUG magazine page 33 



LIST LOCK REVISITED 



Adapted to VIC 20 Sc C-64 by Nancy Lecompte 

Lewislon, Maine 

A recent programming project prompted me to dig out an 
old TORPET issue in which 1 remembered seeing a protec- 
tion routine to prevent curious people from listing a 
program. This seemed to be exactly what I needed, except it 
was written for BASIC 4.0 and I needed it for a C-64. Since I 
recently started learning machine language and the article 
was well documented, I decided to make the conversion. 
While I was at it, why not do it for the VIC 20 too! The 
original article was published in the November-December 
1982 TORPEl" by Steven Darnold and provides a good 
expl nation of what this routine does. I will not attempt to 
explain it again. 

I decided that the routine should be in the form of a BASIC 
loader, as many do not have monitors for their VIC 20 or 
C-64. You can add the routine to any program you already 
have or build it into new programs. 1 have also provided the 
''key'', so that you may unlock, in order to make changes to 
the program, and relock the listing at your will. Of course, 
in order for this routine to prevent unwanted spectators 
from listing the program, you must guard the instructions 
with yoin~ life. If you are a teacher, don't have the instruc- 
tions in school, students have a w;iv ol finding things they 
shotdd not find. 

Any novice machine language programmer should be able 
to create custom ''keys". First study the original article. The 
important things to note are the number of asterisks in the 
REM statement, the location of the system call, and the new 
location of the BASIC program. By adding more asterisks, 
using this new space to move things around (moving the SYS 
location and/or start of BASIC), and making the proper 
changes to the SYS and POKE43 commands, you should be 
able to create an endless number of SYS and PO KE combina- 
tions as^keys'MJ si ngdifferent "keys", your method of protec- 
tion will appear inconsisi en tund discourage most from even 
U'\ ing to break into your programs. 

I decided that I did not know enough about interrupt 
programming, so I reverted to a simple BASIC POKE to 
disable the RUN/STOP RESTORE keys. An added benefit 
of this is that if the program breaks due to an error the 
program can be listed, however, it is garbage! This solved 
both problems thattheoriginal interrupt portion was designed 
to solve. It is important to remember that this disable POKE 
should be the first line of your program, after the REM and 
GOSUB lines. This is the only line that will actually remain in 
your program after the first run. If you place it furtheralong, 
the program will not be completely protected until after the 
line you placed it on has been executed. 

Now, on to the good part! But first, make sure the program 
you want to protect does not have lines numbered 0,1,2,3, or 
greater then 63900. If it does, simply renumber the lines out 
of these ranges. 



Protecting A Program For The First Time: 

1 . Turn the computer off, then back on (assure a clean start) 

2. Load the program to be protected. 

3. Add the appropriate lines of code (exactly) to your 
program. 

FOR THE C-64: 



««#«««4 + 4i*»»«4it*4«««:jii*ifi«a«i|t«w* 



1 REM****** 
2GOSI:B63900:STOP 
3 POKE 808,225 

63900 for x = 2048 to 2090:read c:poke x,c: 
next:Rp:turn 

63910 DATA 00,1 1,08,100,00,158,50,48 
63920 DATA 54,49,00,00,00,169,147,141 
63930 DATA 119,02,169,82,141,120,02,169 
63940 DATA 213,141,121,02,169,13,141,122 
63950 DATA 02,169,04,133,198,169,43,133 
63960 DATA 43,96,00 

FOR THE UNEXPANDED VIC 20 CHANGE THE 
FOLLOWING LINES: 

3 POKE 808,100 
63900 FOR X = 4096 to 4138:READ C:POKE X,C:NEXT: 

RETURN 
63910 DATA 00,11,16,100,00,158,52,49 
63920 DATA 48,57,00,00,00,169,147,141 

FOR THE EXPANDED VIC 20 (8K or more) 
CHANGE THE FOLLOWING LINES: 

3 POKE 808,100 
63900 FOR X = 4608 to 4650:READ C:POKE X,C:NEXT: 

RETURN 
63910 DATA 00,11,18,100,00,158,52,54 
63920 DATA 50,49,00,00,00,169,147,141 
NOTE: line 1 contains 36 asterisks and is very important!!! 

4. It may be wise to save your program at this time. If you 
made a typing error, it will save you from retyping. If you 
are a good typist or are using a tape system, this may not be 
important. 

5. Type RUN, there will be a short pause, then the com- 
puter will respond with BREAK IN 2. 

6. Type POKE 43,43 (all machines). 

7. You should list your program. Notice that line 1 has 
disappeared. 

8. Delete line 2 and lines 63900 to 63960 from your program 
now. 

9. Line 3 should be the only new line left in your program at 
this point. 

10. Type POKE 43,1 (all machines). 

11. Type LIST. You should only see one line: 

100SYS2061 (C-64 version); 

100 SYS4109 (VIC 20 version); 

100 SYS4621 (VIC 20+ version); 

12. Now you can save the protected program using the 

continued on next page 



page 34 TPUG magazine 



normal procedure for saving BASIC programs with your 
system. 

13. Verify that your protected program is working properly 

Reset the computer 
Load the protected program 

LIST should show the above line 100 (nothing more) 
RUN should blank the screen 
Print 2 characters in the Home position 
Start running your program normally 
You should not be able to break out of the program 
If the program breaks, due to error, the listing should be 
garbage 

14. If things don't work, go back to the beginning and start 
over. Be careful to follow the directions exactly and double 
check your typing. 



Locking And Unlocking Protected Programs: 

1. Reset your computer. 

2. Load your protected program. 

3. Type POKE 43,43 

4. Delete line 3 (temporary) or add a REM in front (3 REM 
POKE 808,255). If line 3 is not removed, you will nol be able 
to debug your program. 

5. Now make your corrections, etc. 

6. When done, add line 3 back or remove the REM (don't 
forget this). 

7. Type POKE 43,1 

8. Save the new version. 

9. Verify that the protected program still works. 
And that's all there is to it folks. TPlfO 



COMvoice 



Who says computers should be seen and not heard? 

COMvoice brings you the voice of the future. A speech synthesizer that extends the 

power of speech to Commodore 64 and VIC-20 personal computers. 

COMvoice features autonnatic Engiish-to-Speech conversion. With unlimited 

vocabulary. And four levels of speech inflection. 

The two-part voice package includes speech module 

and loudspeaker. It attaches simply to the computer 

expansion slot. An external amplifier may be 

used for applications where 

additional volume is required. It's 

ideal for interaction in educational 

programs because COMvoice is 

easily programmed from BASIC. 

So why not let your computer speak 

for itself? The complete package is 

$169.95. 



Dealer 

inquiries 

invited. 




Milne's Computer Control Systems 62 Wood Crescent Regina, Saskatchwan S4S 6J7 Ph: 1 •306-584-1 988 



TPUG magazine page 35 




Discounted price 


for most syst. 


BRODERBUND (GAMES) 




Lode Runner D C 


$41 


Spare Change D 


$41 


DrolD 


$41 


Choplifter C D 


$41 


Seafox C D 


$41 


(Cartridge version extra) 




Bank Street Writer D 


$85 


INFOCOM (ADVENTURES) 


Witness D 


$59 


Planetfall D 


$59 


SYNAPSE (GAMES) 




Fort Apocalypse D T 


$41 


Blue Max D T 


$41 


SnUUS (GAMES - for mo 


St) 


Snake Byte D 


$36 


Bandits D 


$41 


Type Attack D 


$47 


Squish'em C APPLE 


$48 


DC-64 


$41 



SMA (SYSTEMS 




MGT. ASSOC.) 




Docu mate -tern plate 




C-64orVIC-20 


$16 


CodePro-64-Tutorial 




for basic plus sprite & 




music generator 


$70 


COMM'DATA 




EDUCATIONAL (VIC & C-64) 


ToddJer Tutor 


$34 


Primary Math Tutor 


$34 


Math Tutor 


$34 


English Invaders Games 


$34 


Gotcha Math Games 


$34 


Mathpack 1 


$23 


Mathpack 2 


$23 


Englishpack 1 


$23 


Englishpack 2 


$23 


Sciencepack 1 


$23 


Arcadepack 1 


$23 


(T D avail, for each) 





DEALER INQUIRIES 
INVITED FOR: 

Programmer's Institute 

Kiwi soft 

Victory Software 

Comm'Data 

SMA 



Discounted price 
for most syst. 

PROGRAMMER'S INSTITUTE 
(FUTUREHOUSE) 

"Edumate Light Pen" $36 

C-64, VIC 

"Playground Software"™ 

(Uses Light Pen) C-64 

Animal Crackers D $36 

Computer Crayons D $36 

Alphabet Arcade D $36 

Bedtime Stories D $36 



"C.P.A. Complete Personal 
Accountant"™ C-64, VIC 

Complete Set (1, 2 & 3) DT 
Finance #1 DT 
Finance #2 D T 
Finance *3 D T 
Finance #4 D T 

KIWISOFT (C-64) 

Paintpic-64 

Art on your screen 

VICTORY SOFTWARE 

20/64 Dual Packs 
Cassettes (T) or Disks (D) 

GAMES 

Metamorphosis T D 

Creator's Revenge T D 

Labyrinth of Creator T D 

Galactic Conquest T D 

Kongo Kong T D 

Chomper Man T D 

Annihilator T D 

Adventure Pack I 

(3Prog)TD 

Adventure Pack H 

(3 Prog) T D 

Bounty Hunter (Adv) T D 

Grave Robbers (Graphic 

Adv) T D 

(Disk version: $4. extra) 



$94 
$36 
$36 
$36 
$36 



$45 



$30 
$30 
$30 
$30 
$30 
$30 
$30 

$30 

$30 
$30 

$24 



PRECISION SOFTWARE 
(SOJCOM INTX.) 

Super Base 64 (Data Mgt. 
System & Report Gen.) D $117 
Calc-Result (easy) C $120 

Calc-Result (advanced) C + D $190 
(3 dimensional) 



(C) CARTRIDGE (T) TAPE (D) DISKETTE 

We assume that you have seen the manufactureTs* original ads 
elsewhere in this or other fine computer magazines. 



I^ease call for info on your computer model, availability and specific price. 
Send certified cheque, money order or call and use your Visa or Mastercard. 
Personal cheques require two or three weeks to clear. All prices subject to 
change without notice. Please include $2.00 per order for postage and 
handling. Quebec residents only add P.S.T. 

CaUToU Free l-(800) 361-0847 

except Western Canada; Nlld. and 

Montreal area (514) caU coUect 

CALL COLLECT (514) 325-6203 

between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time 
or send order to: 6864 JARRY EAST, MONTREAL, QUE. HIP 3C1 



COMSPEC 

866 Wilson Ave., Downsview 
633-5605 

• HARDWARE 

• SOFTWARE 

• SERVICE 

• BOOKS 

• ACCESSORIES 

^ commodore 

Off the Shelf Delivery 
Trade-ins Accepted 

c-64 COMPUTER 348.88 

WICO "BOSS" 19.95 

WICO 'S-WAY' 32.95 

WICO "BAT HANDLE" 29.95 

EASY SCRIPT 49.00 

COMMODORE VIC CARTRIDGES 13.95 

COMMODORE C-64 CARTRIDGES 22.95 

BOX OF 10 DISKS 19.95 

WITH THIS AD 



10% Discount to 
TPUG Members 

on software. books and accessories, 
(not including sale items) 

TPUG Library 
Available For Copy 



CO 


Dufferin St. 






Wilson 


Ave. 




Hwy. 401 





^ 



MosterCord 




page 36 TPUG magcuine 



COMPUSERVE VIDTEX 



William Wilbur 

Kittery, Maine 

The VIDTEX program from CompuServe is advertised as 
an Intelligent Terminal Emulator for Commodore PET 
4032 and 8032, 32K, Disk Systems, and RS-232 Modems 
{IEEE-488 is also available). The selling price is S39.95 U.S. 
and may be ordered while on-line with CompuServe. 

The version of VIDTEX that Til be reviewing will be for 
the CBM 4032, 4040 Dual Disk, and the RS-232 modem. My 
equipment is an updated PET 2001-32N (BASIC 4.0), 4040 
Dual Disk, CBM 8023P printer, and the Anchor Automa- 
tion Signalman Mk.IV modem. 

I'm not what you'd call a networking nut! I spend an aver- 
age of 3 hours per month on line with CompuServe and, so 
far, have resisted the urge to log in on any of the PBBS 
systenis available! I don't enjoy the potential long distance 
telephone charges involved. If you get the urge to contact 
me through CompuServe, my User ID is 74135,1070. 

VIDTEX is a very well documented terminal emulator 
program, written by Duane Harris for CompuServe. In the 
beginning of the users' manual it is suggested that the user 
first read the entire manual before running VIDTEX, a 
suggestion I highly recommend due to the many, many 
options buih into VIDTEX. 

Let's take a look at sonie of the VIDTEX features. First of 
all, VIDTEX contains its own keyboard decoder which 
allows the program to simulate many of the ASCII charac- 
ters that are not on the PET/CBM keyboard. This decoder 
also provides an additional level of characters called "Meta- 
characters". More on these later. 

The control key (on my machine) is the OFF/RVS which is 
used by holding down the OFF/RVS while pressing the 
desired character. For example; to transmit a control-C you 
would press and hold the OFF/RVS while pressing the "C" 
key. Some of the control keys supported are; A, S, Q, C, B, 
P, H, U, V, and O. 

The "Meta" key is used much the same way. This time you 
press and hold the CLR/HOME key while pressing the 
Meta-key of your choice. One example is the "Help Page" 
which displays a list of the redefined keys. Press Meta-H 
and the following table is displayed: 

KEY DEFINITIONS 

OFF/RVS 
CLR/HOME 
REPEAT 
Escape (Graphic) 
RUN/STOP 
CRSR down 
CRSR right 
INST/DEL 



Control key 

Meta key 

Display Menu (Business) 

Control-C 
Line Feed 
Tab 
Backspace 



attention signal. 

To take a look at the available remote operations, press 
Meta-M. You'll get the following table: 

META KEY FUNCTIONS 



Ram Buffer 
OOpen 
Z Zero 
D Display 
S Save 
V Transmit 
Used: 0000 

LOCAL CONTROL 

E Enable Clean 
R Printer On 
: Print Screen 

MISCELLANEOUS 



G Get Screen 

C Close 

L Load 

P Print 

U Unedited Save 

Y Transmit w/prompt 

Free; 0000 



B Break Words 
T Printer Off 
K Clear Screen 



F Function Keys 
M Menu 
J Old Logon 



Typing a control-RUN/STOP will transmit a break sequence 
of 250 milliseconds which is used on some systems as an 



X Exit 

A Abort 

HHelp 

I New Logon 

N Scratch File 

O Query/Set Status 

W Create Window 

Press your choice 

or <RETURN> for terminal mode 

See what I mean about reading the manual first! The old 
adage of "when all else fails, read the instructions" applies 
quite well with VIDTEX. 

Let's take a quick look at the various functions available; 
Word Cleaning (or word wrapping) ensures that no words 
are started on one line and completed on the next. This 
feature may be disabled but I find the screen much easier to 
read if it is enabled. You may have your printer connected 
and operating while on line, a controLS is automatically 
sent to the host each time a line is printed, and a control-Q is 
sent to tell the host to continue. This is quite handy at times, 
but tends to increase your hook-up time somewhat. 

You may obtain a printed copy of the entire screen by 
typing a Meta-: (Meta Colon). You can abort this, and most 
other functions, by entering a Meta-A. 

Ten user-defined function keys (Meta-0 through Meta-9) 
are supported. The only restriction is that the total amount 
of characters for all the function key definitions cannot 
exceed 255 characters. The definitions may be saved on disk 
for further use. By using several file names, you could have 
an unlimited number of function keys defined. 

The Ram Buffer allows you to save all characters received 
in an otherwise unused portion of memory, only 9822 charac- 
ters in my machine. However, if the buffer becomes almost 
full, a message is displayed on the screen and a control-S is 
sent to the host. This allows you to save the buffer contents. 

continued overleaf 



TPUG magazine page 37 



zero the buffer, and continue after you sent a control-Q. If 
the host does not stop transmitting or you send a control-Q 
without zeroing the buffer, it will automatically be closed. 
This buffer is also used to send text or messages, with or 
without a prompt, to the host computer. This allows you to 
compose a message while off line, load it into the buffer, 
then send it while on line again. 

The Ram Buffer, while being quite handy, is not quite the 
feature I would like it to be. I prefer a "streaming" capture 
buffer which places the incoming data direct to disk. VIDTEX 
does support direct to (and from) disk during file or pro- 
gram transfers, but otherwise you have to open the buffer, 
save the buffer, zero the buffer, and so forth. The lack of a 
"streaming" capture buffer is, to me, a very serious short 
coming. Perhaps Mr. Punter's BBS program has spoiled 
me? 

One very nice feature of VIDTEX is Autolog. This handy 
feature allows you to set up automatic log on procedures for 
just about any system you wish to access. The set up for an 
Autolog file is quite simple. Enter a Meta-I, and you will be 
prompted for a file name. If you press <RETURN>, then 
the file name "vidtex auto" will be used. As with most other 
VIDTEX features, this can be aborted by entering a Meta-A. 
VIDTEX will ask you what prompt to wait for and the 
response to send when that prompt is received. The maxi- 
mum length for each response is 64 characters. You can 
repeat this prompt/response sequence as many times as you 
desire. To finish or end creating an Autolog sequence file, 
enter an ESCAPE at a prompt and another ESCAPE at the 
response. After you have completed an Autolog file sequence, 
you will be returned to the terminal mode. During an 
Autolog sequence, the keyboard remains active, allowing 
data to be sent during Autolog without affecting the sequence. 
One feature of Autolog which I am unable to test is the 
automatic dialing function. I have yet to acquire an auto- 
dial modem. 

File transfer is fairly simple. Three types of file transfer are 
supported; text, binary, and machine specific. A text trans- 
fer is used to transfer ASCII text files such as those pro- 
duced by PaperMate. The binary transfer is for tokenized 
BASIC and machine language programs. A machine spe- 
cific transfer is used to transfer machine dependent files. 
VIDTEX inserts all the information require to recreate the 
file as it originally existed. 



You can alter the communication characteristics of VIDTEX 
by entering a Meta-Q. Options include; Parity which can be 
disabled, zero, one, even, or odd. Flow Control can be 
enabled or disabled, Baud Rate may be set from 1 10 to 600 
baud, and you can select Full or Half Duplex. 

Some of the common communications requirements are; 
CompuServe, zero parity, full duplex, flow control enabled, 
110 to 600 baud. The Source and Dow Jones, even parity, 
full duplex, flow control disabled, 110 to 300 baud. Check 
the appropriate users' manual for the requirements for 
other systems. 

VIDTEX also supports remote cursor positioning which 
allows the host computer to place text (or graphics!) any- 
where on the screen. This function is very important for 
you game lovers out there. If you want to play Mega Wars 
II, Word Scramble, Concentration, or Seawar, VIDTEX is 
required ! Not being a "real" gamer, I've yet to try any of the 
CompuServe games. Maybe some day! 

In the event that you do not have a McTerm or IntelCom 
cable, the VIDTEX manual provides a diagram showing 
the necessary wiring connections to make your own RS-232 
cable. 

My overall impression of VIDTEX is very favorable. After 
spending some time studying the users' manual, I find the 
program fairly easy to operate, taking into consideration 
the numerous options and functions available. My biggest 
gripe is the lack of a "streaming" data capture, direct to disk 
feature. This lack is rather akin to being served a gigantic 
hot fudge sundae without the cherry on top! 

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to find the "ideal" 
communications program. So far, all the programs I've 
found come close but not quite close enough. Since I'm far 
from being a "whiz-bang" programmer, I hereby toss the 
gauntlet! How about a communications program that com- 
bines the best features of VIDTEX and Steve Punter's PBBS 
package, allows for various printer options, provides a 
"streaming" direct to disk data capture with files compatable 
with either WordPro, PaperMate, or PaperClip, supports 
both IEEE-488 and RS-232 modems, and could be config- 
ured for auto-answer operation. If this "dream" program 
happened to be in the public domain and in the TPUG 
library, so much the better, if not, quote a price! TPVG 



TH\S ISTVAE LKTESiT THIMG» \N 
VI DEO CaKMES . \T'S " ULTRK- REAb 
A^TIC 3-D JUNG.LE DUDE'if y# 




page 38 TPUG magazine 



CodePro-64 (c) 1983, SMA 



- Using CodePro-64 

1 — CBM-64 Keyboard Review 

BASIC Tutorial 

2 — Introduction to BASIC 

3 — BASIC Commands 

4 — BASIC Statements 

5 — BASIC Functions 

Graphics & Music 

6 - Keyboard GRAPHICS 

7 — Introduction to SPRITES 

8 — SPRITE Generator 

9 — SPRITE Demonstrator 
A — Introduction to MUSIC 
B — MUSIC Generator 

C — MUSIC Demonstrator 

Other Options 

K — Keyword Inquiry 

R — Run Sample Programs 



A new concept 
in interactive visual 
learning. 

CodePro-64™ 



Now you can leam to code in BASIC and 
develop advanced programming skills with 
graphics, sprites and musk^visually. You 
leam by interacting with CodeFW64, a new 
concept in interactive visual learning. 
SEE PROGRAM EXECUTION 

Imagine actually seeing BASIC state- 
ments execute. CodePro-64 guides you 
through structured examples of BASIC pro- 
gram segments. You enter the requested data 
or let CodePro-64 do the typing for you. (It 
will not let you make a mistake.) 

You step through and actually see the 
execution of sample program statements by 
simply pressing the space bar. CodePro-64 
does the rest. You see statements with cor- 
responding graphics and variable value 
displays. 

EXTENSIVE TUTORIAL 

CodePro-64's extensive tutorial guides 
you through each BASIC command, pro- 
gram statement, and function. You get clear 
explanations. Where appropriate, you invoke 
BasicView to see examples execute and 
watch their flow charts and variables change. 

By seeing graphic displays of program seg- 
ment execution you leam by visual example. 
You kam faster and grasp programming 
concepts easiermth CodePro-64 because 
you immediately see the results of your input. 

You control your leaming. You can go 
through the tutorial sequentially, orretum to 
the main menu and select different topics, or 
use keywords to select language elements to 
study. You can page back and forth betv^?een 
screens within a topic at the touch of a func- 
tion key. 

Once you have practiced and mastered the 
BASIC language elements you move on to 



more advanced concepts. You leam about 

sprite and music programming. 

SPRITE GENERATOR 
& DEMONSTRATOR 

CodeFW64's sprite generator lets you 
define your own sprites on the screen. You 
leam how to define sprites and what data 
values correspond to your sprite definitions. 
(You can then save your sprite data to a 
diskette file for use in your own programs.) 
You can easily experiment with different 
definitions and make changes to imme- 
diately see the effects. 

We also help you leam to program with 
sprites by giving you a sprite demonstrator so 
you can see the effect of changing register 
values. You can experiment by moving your 
sprite around in a screen segment, change its 
color and see the effects of your changes. You 
leam by visual examples. 

MUSIC GENERATOR 
& DEMONSTRATOR 

Our Music Generator d^d Music Demon- 
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creative enjoyment. FVom the beginning of 
your instruction you can compose simple 
tunes on the screen using the generator. 
Once you've completed a composition you 
can 5az;e //z^ ^n^ and its associated SID 
parameters to a diskette file. Our music sam- 



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lar sound. Then you hear each sound by 
playingthe ''keyboardorgan"'mm^[\lra^^s 
you shift from row to row of SID parameters. 
By seeing your input and hearing the result 
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SySTEMS 

MANAGEMENT 

ASSOCIATES 



VIC 20 AND THE $28 MODEM 



C Gray 

Nepean, Ont. 

I first encountered the 'S28 Modem' 
about 6 months ago; and believing it 
was a fantastic bargain, promptly put 
my money down. When it arrived I 
peeked into the box, pulled out a huge 
plastic case (the modemP) and eagerly 
read the documentation. 

. . . Sons of VIC!!! How do you hook 
this thing up P. . . We're not quite sure? 
. . . Feeling like the Eskimo who bought 
a fridge, I repacked the box and put it 
in cold storage. Occasionally, I would 
re-open it to show friends, and explain 
"But, of course, I still have to hook it 
up." 

Now the freeze is over!! 

If you already have the modem, or 
were considering it, then read on. .It 
works on the VIC 20! 1! and will also work 
on theC-641! 

To begin, the 'S28 Modem' is an origi- 
nate-acoustic modem manufactured by 



Novation; which originally lived in a 
DECwriter terminal. It was (still is?) 
available from surplus stores in the 
Toronto area. Data is sent at baud rates 
from 110 to 300, in full duplex mode. 
Its interface is at 'TTL' voltage levels, 
which is just what the VIC 20 user port 
wants to see. To run it on the VIC 20 
there are 4 items to deal with. 

1. Power supply for the modem 

2. Two changes to the modem circuit 

3. Connection of power supply and 
interface to the VIC 20 

4. Software — terminal program 
(TPUG library) 

1. Power Supply 

The modem requires 3 voltage levels 
( + 12,-12, and +5). Since the VIC 20 
supply is only +5, a separate supply 
must be built. Fig.l shows the config- 
uration. I assume the reader has some 
experience in building circuits, hence 
I will only discuss a few tips. If you 
lack experience, I advise that you seek 



assistance on board layout etc. 

The supply is the standard fixed regu- 
lator design and the parts are readily 
available. The transformer should have 
a secondary of 25v, centre tap; and a 
current rating of 300 ma. A Hammond 
transformer, part #166F25, is available 
from most major part stores. During 
construction, just be sure of diode polar- 
ity in the bridge, and capacitor polarity, 
for the +/— voltage rails. Be aware, 
the pin out of the — 12v regulator is 
not the same as the +12/5 regulators. 
(This pin out difference is shown in 
Fig.l). Since the modem circuitry is 
mainly CMOS, the current drain is 
quite low; hence heatsinking is not 
required for the 3 voltage regulators. 

NOTE: The lOOma input fuse is a safe 
precaution; and MUST be included. 
Once the supply is built, verify the 
output voltages without any load con- 



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continued on next page 



page 40 TPUG magazine 



nected.If you've got this far, the rest is 
a piece of cake. 

2. Modem Changes 

The modem has a number of cut strap 
options. For connection to the VIC 20, 
there are only 2 changes (receive and 
transmit) that are required. 

The modem receive mod, makes the 
signal received from the VIC 20 non- 
inverting. 

The modem transmit mod, inverts the 
signal transmitted to the VIC 20, using 
a simple transistor circuit. 

All changes can be made on the pcb. 
Fig. 2 shows the locations of existing 
pcb holes that must be de-soldered and 
use for mods. Details of the two mods 
are discussed below. 

Removal of the pcb from that huge 
case is easy; but be careful when remov- 
ing the carrier detect LED. 

Now you are ready to start the mods. 
2.1 Modem Receive Change 

The change is shown in Fig,2a; one cut 
and one strap. 

For the cut, identify the location of the 
strap 'W6' marked on the foil side. If 
you are not sure, verify by tracing the 
connection from pin 10 of Z9 to pin 1 
of Z7. Once you are sure of this track 
location ('W6') cut out a short section 
of the copper track. 

For the strap, connect a wire from pin 
1 of Z7 to pin 11 of Z9. This strap is 
shown in Fig. 2 as 'W5'. 



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This change is shown in Fig. 2b, and is 
a simple transistor inverter. The mod 
consists of; one cut, one strap, and the 
addition of two resistors and one tran- 
sistor. 

For the cut, identify strap 'W17' on the 
foil side, and cut the track. De-solder 
the holes for mounting the transistor, 
resistors and strap 'VV18'. The location 
of these holes is shown in Fig. 2, and 



are as follows: 

Transistor (2-V2222A) E = emitter; 
B = base; C=collector 

Resistors — holes are marked for R81 = 
33K, and R82=4K7 

The wire strap is identified as 'WIS'. 
Insert the components as shown in 
Fig. 2; double check and then solder. If 
you are still not sure of these connec- 



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continued overleaf 



TPUG magazine page 41 



tions, then trace the connections, as 
shown in Fig. 2b. 

3. Connection and Interface 

All interface connections are via the 
muhi-coloured ribbon cable (Jl of the 
Modem) as follows: (Refer to Fig. 3) 

3.1 Connection to Power Supply 

— Connect green to +5 

— Connect blue to +12 

— Connect purple to -12 

— Connect brown to ground return of 
the power supply 

3.2 Connection to VIC 20 User Port 

Access to the VIC 20 User port is via a 
12 position edge connector, (24pins) 
on 0.156 spacing. 

— Connect yellow wire to 'M' of user 
port 

— Connect orange wire to 'B' and 'C of 
user port 

— Connect red wire to 'N' of user port. 

Remember, the dravving (Fig. 3), is a 
view looking into the user port with 
the connector plugged in. 

Avoid any shorts of adjacent pins of 
the connector. The 65ZZ VIA (user 
port) is not buffered, and could be 
damaged. You should 'key' the connec- 
tor so that it cannot be inserted 'upside 
down'. 



That completes the hardware instruc- 
tions. You may find, the simplest way 
to 'package' this hardware, is to cut the 
existing plastic case, mount all hard- 
ware inside, and finish it off with a 
wooden base and sides. Be sure to 
re-mount the carrier detect LED. 

4. Software — Terminal Program 

I have used VICterm (TPUG library 
(V)[ N), with the following mod, and 
have not had any problems. This is a 
BASIC program that lacks some fea- 
tures, but it will get you started. 

The mod corrected the printing of 
reverse cursor characters, if a double 
quote (") was received. The change is 
in line 100. 

100 OPEN 5,2,3, CHRS(38) + 
CHRS(160):DIMF(255), T(255) 

If you wish to change the colour, you 
can add to the end of line 100 ":POKE 
36879,XXX"; where XXX = your de- 
sired colour. For XXX=42, you get a 
blue background with white characters 

5. Putting It To Work! 

Now for the fun part. For first time 
users, the procedure is very easy. 

1. Load and run VICterm or other 
terminal program. 

2. Now, dial the modem phone #, when 



you hear a high pitched tone; place 
the handset into the coupler. (There is 
a label on the coupler marked 'cord' 
that indicates the cord end of the 
handset.) 

3. When you see the carrier detect LED 
turn on ; press the VIC 20's Return key 
a couple of times. The host will respond 
and you are now communicating!!! 

A couple of things about operation. 

1. Since this is an acoustic modem, no 
approval by Ma Bell is required. 

2. Those neat one-piece telephones with 
re-dial facility will NOT fit the coupler. 
That's a real shame, but that's the way 
it is! The coupler will only fit thestan- 
dard Ma Bell 500/2500 telephone set. 
These telephones use a carbon trans- 
mitter, which have a habit, over time, 
of packing the carbon granules. This 
reduces the output level, and could 
cause transmission errors. A sharp 
knock to the handset will, in most cases, 
correct this. If you still have problems, 
you might consider an electret replace- 
ment for the carbon transmitter. 

I have been using the 'S28 Modem' for 
the last 3 months and all has been well. 
If you follow these instructions, it 
should work the first time. 

I welcome any comments or questions. 
Best regards and good luck to all. TPVG 



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page 42 TPUG magazine 



G-PASCAL For The 64 



Steven Darnold 

Alexandra, New Zealand 

The Commodore 64 is very popular in 
New Zealand and Australia, and the 
demand for software is high. Most pro- 
grams are imported directly from Brit- 
ain or America, or are copied locally 
under license. However, recently, sev- 
eral high quality programs have been 
produced down under. G-PASCAL is 
one such program. 

G-PASCAL is a Pascal editor/compiler 
with an extensive set of special com- 
mands for the Commodore 64's gra- 
phics, sound, clock and joystick. It is 
produced by Gambit Games in Aus- 
tralia. 

One of the big advantages of the Com- 
modore 64 is its ability to turn off the 
resident BASIC and replace it with 
another language. This is exactly what 
G-PASCAL does. Load the program 
from disk or tape and your 8K BASIC 
interpreter is replaced by a 16K Pascal 
compiler. 

G-PASCAL has several advantages over 
BASIC. It is faster, it makes the use of 
graphics and sound much easier, and 
it is highly structured. G-PASCAL will 
be of particular interest to people writ- 
ing games programs and to teachers 
and students of structured program- 
ming. 

My first attempt to write a Pascal pro- 
gram resulted in a flurry of syntax 
errors. Pascal expects things to be done 
in a certain way, and experienced 
BASIC programmers in particular will 
find it a bit uncomfortable. For example, 
you can't just drop an X into your 
program when you need it. First, up at 
the top of the program, you have to 
declare X as a variable. Such idiosyn- 
crasies gave rise to many errors in my 
programs and I had to do a lot of 
corrections. Unfortunately, the G- 
PASCAL editor is not quite as good as 
the usual Commodore editor. You have 
to go into a special edit mode before 
you can alter a line. This is a nuisance 
at first, but it is still relatively easy to 
edit programs. 



Once a G-PASCAL program is com- 
pleted, it needs to be compiled into 
P-code. For short programs this is prac- 
tically instantaneous — you can press 
C (for compile) and R (for run) in one 
motion. For longer programs the com- 
piler takes about one second for every 
100 lines. Normally G-PASCAL has 
enough room to keep both the source 
program and its P-code in memory at 
the same time. Thus, if there is a run- 
time error, you can quickly call up the 
source program, correct the mistake 
and recompile. For extra long pro- 
grams, G-PASCAL can save the source 
program to tape or disk and lise all of 
its memory for the P-code. 

The commands make it relatively easy 
to create spectacular graphics. Special 
commands are used to select various 
modes and colours, and particular atten- 
tion is given to designing and moving 
sprites. For example, the MOVE- 
SPRITE command makes a sprite move 
at a specified speed for a specified 
distance. Once the command is given 
the sprite moves automatically from 
then on. The sprite can also be ani- 
mated by instructing it to sequence 
through a series of sprite definitions. 
Up to 16 different definitions can be 
used and the sequencing is automatic. 

G-PASCAL's sprite capabilities are by 
far the best I have encountered. The 
other types of graphics, however, are 
not so well catered for. The bit-map 
has only a simple PLOT command, 
and no special support is given for 
programmable characters. Neverthe- 
less, the use of logical commands instead 
of obscure PEEKs and POKEs facili- 
tates the use of all types of graphics. 
G-PASCAL also takes the PEEKs and 
POKEs out of music making. There 
are sound commands for all SID regis- 
ters and there is a delay function cali- 
brated in 1/lOOths of a second. 

The special features go on and on. 
Clearly, G-PASCAL is much more than 
just an ordinary Pascal compiler. 
However, in some respects it is also 
much less. G-PASCAL does not imple- 
ment all the specifications of standard 



Pascal. 

It faithfully uses the structure of stan- 
dard Pascal, but it is limited in the 
types of data it can handle. Standard 
Pascal uses five data types; integer, 
character, Boolean, real, and user- 
defined. G-PASCAL uses only the first 
two. 

The Boolean type is no problem. G- 
PASCAL includes all the Boolean 
operators, and a Boolean datum will 
work as normal if it is converted to a 
character datum. 

The real data type is more of a problem. 
G-PASCAL uses (3-byte) integer arith- 
metic only. This limits values to the 
whole numbers between -8388608 and 
+ 8388607. Numbers outside this range 
and fractions will require special pro- 
cedures. Moreover, none of the stan- 
dard functions for reals are available 
in G-PASCAL. This includes such 
things as sine and square root. 

The user-defined data type is also a 
problem. This is a popular feature of 
standard Pascal, and many programs 
use it. Anyone trying to type in stan- 
dard Pascal programs under G- 
PASCAL will have some converting 
to do. The G-PASCAL manual gives 
instructions for such conversions. 

In total, G-PASCAL is an attractive 
product. It combines most of the fea- 
tures of Pascal with a powerful gra- 
phics/sound package. G-PASCAL will 
be of interest to three types of people: 
those who want something faster than 
BASIC without the heartache of ma- 
chine language, those who want a lan- 
guage that fully supports the graphics 
and sound capabilities of the C-64, and 
those who want to write structured pro- 
grams that are well organized and easy 
to read- 

G-PASCAL has only recently arrived 
in New Zealand from Australia, and I 
don't know whether it is being distri- 
buted in America. If your local dealer 
hasn't heard of it, write direct to Gam- 
bit Games, P.O. Box 124, Ivanhoe, Vic- 
toria 3079, Australia. TPUC 



TPUG magazine page 43 



SUPERPET'S SUPER SOFTWARE 



Brad Bjorndahl 

Bramalea, Ontario 

There is general agreement among 
computer users, even hardware hackers, 
that a machine's usefulness depends 
on its software. However, the great 
number of operating systems, word 
processors, languages (and their dia- 
lects), databases and so on indicates 
that everyone has his/her own opinion 
of what is useful and what is not. The 
people who have provided the inter- 
preters and operating system for the 
SuperPET have implemented their own 
opinions, policies and philosophies in 
their 'microSystems' series. The results 
are interesting from a historical point 
of view and give the owner of a Super- 
PET a sound and thorough range of 
software utilities and languages. 

The University of Waterloo (Waterloo, 
Ontario) is the origin of the concepts 
that have been used. Waterloo has spe- 
cialized in the computing area for many 
years. Many students in the 1960's 
and 70's endured their first (and usually 
last) data processing course with Wa- 
terloo's famous WATFOR (for Water- 
loo Fortran) and WATFIV (for Water- 
loo Fortran IV). Bad puns go way back. 

Waterloo products have tended toward 
educational software, such as WATBOL 
(Waterloo COBOL), Waterloo Pascal 
and BASIC, and many other student- 
oriented utilities for editing, job sub- 
mission, etc. WATNEWS is a publica- 
tion of the Computer Systems Group 
(CSC) at the university which describes 
its products. Judging by it, the single 
most important product of CSG has 
been the Waterloo Systems Language, 
a general purpose programming lang- 
uage. WSL was used to write the high- 
level language interpreters for the 
SuperPET, and equivalent interpret- 
ers for the IBM PC, the DEC VAX and 
the IBM 370. According to the liter- 
ature, a high-level program written 
on any of the four machines will run 



on any ot the others, allowing for the 
obvious hardware limitations. This 
portability, as it is called, is a good 
example of one of the inherent biases 
of Waterloo software. This is not a 
criticism. Program design is an exer- 
cise in compromises and for educa- 
tional purposes portability is desired. 
I wonder though, what, if anything, 
was sacrificed for portability. Anyway, 
portability is certainly good and is 
something which was always intended 
but never quite achieved in most high- 
level languages. The portability is com- 
plemented by the communications fea- 
tures which are included such as the 
RS232 interface. Thus one can write a 
program on a SuperPET, transmit it 
(and data) to an IBM 370 and then 
execute it there. 

Before continuing, any further refer- 
ences to high-level languages must 
exclude APL since it is unique and so 
different. 

Since the interpreters were designed 
by the same group and produced with 
the same utility (WSL), they all have 
incorporated in them certain similar 
characteristics. Due to the educational 
slant of the software, the languages 
have almost identical structures con- 
trol statements. That is, they all have 
the equivalent of FOR-NEXT loops, 
WHILE-UNTIL loops, LOOP-UNTIL 
loops, IF-THEN-ELSE control, QUIT 
and QUITIF statements, and GUESS- 
ADMIT control. Those who are not 
familiar with these will, I am sure, 
find them to be very interesting and 
useful. Those who are familiar with 
them will be interested and perhaps 
surprised to learn that these structures 
are also available in the Waterloo 6809 
Assembler. Specifically, the assembler 
has IF-ELSE-ENDIF, GUESS-QUIF- 
ADMIT-ENDGUESS and LOOP- 
QUIF-UNTIL statements. The condi- 
tions used for IF, QUIF, and UNTIL 
are combinations of flags in the condi- 



tion control register of the 6809 pro- 
cessor, such as carry clear, zero, flag 
set, higher, higher or same, etc. 

Another manifestation of the educa- 
tional character of languages is the run- 
time error detection. Generally, errors 
are clearly indicated and explained. 
Being interpreters, variables may be 
displayed after an error breaks exe- 
cution. One could always ask for better 
run-time error messages but those pro- 
vided are more than adequate. 

Actually, the very fact that all the 
supplied high-level languages are inter- 
pretive and, in fact, are not available 
as compilers, is indicative that they 
are intended for educational purposes. 
It is only in an interpreter that a pro- 
grammer can issue debugging com- 
mands in real-time. For example, in 
microFortran a run-time error or a 
PAUSE statement or pressing the 
RUN/STOP key will cause entry to 
the debugger. The available commands 
are "c" for continue execution, "q" for 
quit execution, "e" to execute a valid 
Fortran statement (usually a print), "w" 
for where (e.g. which subroutine), and 
"s" to start single stepping. These are 
highly desirable tools for an educa- 
tional environment. 

To my mind the operating system (O.S.) 
also reflects Waterloo's tendencies. As 
already mentioned, structured concepts 
have been built into the 6809 assembler. 
The assembler will also accept condi- 
tional assembly directives in order to 
allow the programmer to include code 
for alternate run-time conditions. The 
example provided in the manual shows 
code for 40 and 80 column screens so 
that load modules for different ma- 
chines can be assembled after chang- 
ing a single character in the source 
assembly code. Another powerful fea- 
ture of the assembler is an INCLUDE 
directive to pull source code in from a 
separate file. Macros are also supported. 

continued on next page 



page 44 TPUG magazine 



With these features, highly structured 
and modular assembly code may be 
produced. 

Also available to the assembler pro- 
grammer is a set of over 60 machine 
code subroutines. They are particu- 
larly useful as they remove much of 
the overhead required to write an 
assembly program. Therefore a stu- 
dent learning assembly code can jump 
into a significant project with a mini- 
mum of discouraging mundane work. 
For example, ISALPHA is a routine 
to check if the parameter passed to it is 
alphabetic and, is so, return TRUE, 
otherwise FALSE. A more powerful 
example is PRINTF which will for- 
mat a character string and output it to 
the screen. The formatting involves 
scanning the output string for special 
substrings and replacing these sub- 



strings with others. Decimal and hexa- 
decimal numbers or other characters 
and strings and be easily inserted into 
the output string. Many other I/O rou- 
tines are available for opening and 
closing files and so on. One especially 
interesting routine is TABLELOO 
which looks up a sequence of charac- 
ters in a table and returns the position 
in the table. The sequence is compared 
to table entries with a clever masking 
feature using upper and lower case 
characters. The masking allows the pro- 
grammer to specify how many leading- 
characters are necessary to find a match. 
Thus, for example, if the word "enTRY" 
is in the table, at least the two charac- 
ters "en" are needed to cause a match. 
The word "entRY" would require three 
characters "ent" and so on. 

The discussion so far has been an effort 



to support the idea that SuperPET soft- 
ware has been influenced, unwittingly 
or not, to a great extent by Waterloo's 
inclination toward education. In the 
process I believe I have said many 
good things about their product which 
implies that I agree with their approach. 
In fact I cannot decide whether or not 
their approach was the best possible. 
An outsider who had watched the 
design and development would be the 
fairest critic and could say if some- 
thing should have been included that 
was not. For example, perhaps the lan- 
guages would run faster without struc- 
tured code features but Waterloo was 
not interested in execution speed. In 
any case, these are only observations; 
judgment is left to the reader. TPUG 



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TPUG magazine page 45 



C-64 MEETING 

- February 1984 

Ian Wright 

Toronto, Ont. 

The February C-64 meeting was held at its new location in 
the "Cafetorium" of York Mills Collegiate. Somehow I 
expected organ music and flowers — not masses of TPUG 
members. 

At 7:43, Louise Redgers brought the overflowing crowd 
under control and introduced Chris Bennett who gave a 
slide show and talk on the Consumer Electronics Show. 
Chris also fielded a number of questions from the floor, 
during which we found out that over 50% of the audience 
were new owners of C-64s. Doris Bradley made a series of 
announcements about upcoming club events and other infor- 
mation of general interest. 

Jim Butterfield presented the latest version of the Ontario 
Tax Program but explained that the taxation department 
had decided to change the home heating credit since the 
program was designed. A programming update should be 
available before you read this. If you have any complaints, 
there is a money-back guarantee for the cost of the tax 
program. 

According to Jim the <RETURN> key on Commodore 
machines is a "do it" key because if you press <RETURN> 
the computer reads the screen and tries to execute what is 
there. If this screen message is not correct, the result is the 
famous ". . . SYNTAX ERROR" or the C-64's way of asking 
". . . say what?". Jim suggests that there is also a "don't do it" 
key available on the keyboard. This is accessed by pressing 
the <SHIFT> k <RETURN> keys. This can help you in 
many ways — to escape the ubiquitous "quotes mode trap", 
to make corrections without replacing the program in memor}^ 
— anytime that you don't want the screen material to be 
acted upon. Jim gave an example by writing a welcoming 



message of three lines and pressing<SHIFT><RETURN> 
between each line. 

The Bradley brothers (not Bob and Doug!) gave a short 
look at some of the programs on the February disk (C)T6. 
By the end of their presentation snow was starting to fall 
quite heavily and many people decided to head for home 
early. 

After break, Jim Butterfield returned to show a much smaller 
audience how to use string manipulation for graphics. 

To clear the screen and print down 5 rows and over 8 
columns the word "hello": 

PRiNT" :TM)BigMCT»»>»n ELi fi'' — This is a "string" and 

can be represented by HS. 

If a string can include cursor commands, we can use it to 
draw any graphic as a string. Jim drew a car: 

C. PERIOD. II CURSOR RIGHT^ S CURSOR DOWH^ 
..-' - X o RRE GRRPHICS, ^ REVERSE OH, g HOHE. 
■ REVERSE OFF, II CURSOR BRCK, 3 CLR> 



To turn this into a program: 

100 c*=".ii^' — '-^.^iiiiiit^ laMiiiiiio 

120 PR I NT "3 

130 FOR J=l TO 20 

140 V=RHD< 1 :''*20 

150 H=RHD^1.V*:20 

160 PRINT LEFTS:':VS:/v'>;TRB'^H>;Cf 

165 FOR 1=1 TO 500: NEXT I 

170 NEXT J 

180 END 

The result should look like the Don Valley Parkway during 
rush hour — or the parking lot at York Mills High School on 
the evening of Monday February 27, 1984. TPVG 



CENTRAL MEETING 

- March 1984 



Brian Hinz 

Toronto, Ont. 

This was the fourth Central Meeting that I have attended. 
In comparison, the attendance at this meeting was very 
light. 

The meeting was opened by Gord Campbell, as Mike 
Bonnycastle was soaking up the sun in the south. Gord 
started off the meeting by introducing Richard Bradley, 
who read the announcements. The first announcement was 
that Richard was substituting for Doris Bradley who was 
also down south. The club is looking for volunteers for the 



finance committee. If you would like to help out, please 
contact Carol Shevlin at the TPUG office. The Harbour 
Front Computer Center, on April 15, 1984 will hold a 6502 
machine language workshop on the 64 at a cost of S65.00. 

There are three new groups, slated to start in June, 1984. 
The East Side meeting may be held at Dunbarton High 
School. More news next month. Another new group is South 
Lake. It will cover an area north of Metro and south of Lake 
Simcoe. A possible meeting place is Uxbridge High School. 
Also a meeting in Brampton is to start in June. 



page 46 TPUG magazine 



The topic was changed to this year's TPUG Conference. If 
you are planning to take advantage of the reduced registra- 
tion fee, do it now. They are also looking for people to help 
out at the conference, or loan them any equipment for the 
weekend. If you would like to help out please call the 
TPUG office at (416) 782-8900 or 782-9252. 

We were all introduced to our new Sysop, Tom Shevlin. 
Since Tom has taken over the TPUG BBS a few things have 
changed. First of all, the phone number has been changed 
to (416) 429-6044, and the BBS is now in operation 24 hours a 
day, il days a week. The TPUG executive has decided to 
disable the download section of the BBS. This was done to 
allow better access to the BBS by the out-of-town users. The 
upload section of the BBS is still in operation, so once you 
get on the BBS you can upload your submissions to the 
magazine or the TPUG library. Also, you. can now do any 
business with the TPUG office through the BBS. 

Mike Donegan showed us a few programs from this month's 
PET disk. On his list was DISKSPEEDTESTB.Z. This is an 
updated version from last month to run on all drives includ- 
ing 1540/1541 disk drives. When using this program you 
should header or format a new disk on the drive that you 
are testing for the best results. 

Jim Butterfield came up to the front to show us his latest 
copy program, UNIC0PY4.P This is the one copy program 
that does it all. It will copy program and sequential files 
with a single drive from disk to disk, or disk to tape. It is 



written in machine language and has a buffer size of about 
115 blocks. A few of the features are pattern matching, 
multiple copy output and interrogation of the disk directory. 
However, this program will not copy RELative or USR 
files. There is also a version of this same program for the 
Commodore 64. This is just the program many of us have 
been looking for. A job well done, Jim. 

Jim has updated the program COPYALL64 to copy relative 
records correctly. The new program will be in the C-64 
library soon, and will be called COPYALL.64. 

Mike Donegan showed us his disk catalogue control system. 
It should be in the library soon. It will run on a dual disk 
drive system, and keep track of your disk library. It looks 
like a very good system, and we will be looking forward to 
its release into the club library. 

Chris Bennett wrote a screen and input handling program a 
few years ago. It's had a few changes made to it and is now 
called UTILITY4.1.P. Look for this new release to be in the 
PET library next month. It is a good program to edit the 
keys that the user can use in your program. It is written in 
machine language and would make a good subroutine in 
any program when the user has to input data into your 
program or see formatted data on the screen. 

The meeting was jam-packed full of information. You should 
have been there. See you at the Central meeting next month. 



COMMUNICATIONS MEETING 

- March 1984 



Ian A. Wright 

Toronto, Ontario 

Over thirty people showed up for the third communica- 
tions meeting at the York Central Library on the evening 
of March 7th. The meeting was billed as a beginners intro- 
duction to telecommunications^ but some of the questions 
were well advanced — talking of PETSCII to ASCII, parity, 
and baud rates. Once underway, however, the newcomers 
had a grand tour of what telecommunicating is all about. 

A short pause while Craig fetched the necessary phone 
connector was filled with some questions and an advertise- 
ment. The York Central Library has available some com- 
puter software and some VIC 20 computers. The varied 
software is available for seven different computer systems 
and can be borrowed just like A/V material. The VIC 20s 
come with Datasette and joystick and these packages are 
available for S7.50/week (there is a waiting list). The spokes- 
man for the library suggested that if you have unused 
programs at home, the library would appreciate any dona- 
tions and they are tax-deductible. 



The "meat" of this session, however, involved the Bradley 
brothers signing on to various BBS systems as new users, 
while explaining each step of the process in detail. We 
logged on to PSI-Wordpro, which is the grand-daddy of the 
"Punter-system" boards, RTC, and the BBBBS. We tried to 
reach the TPUG-BBS, but it was moving to a new location 
(429-6044 — 24 hrs). However, through the assistance of Ms. 
Belong, one of our members, we logged onto the VAX at 
the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education to show how 
telecommunications can even help you do your homework! 

The meeting was over before the start-up time of some of 
the non-Punter boards, but by careful reading of those 
Boards' instructions, new users should be OK. I emphasize 
here that all new users should hand-dial onto a new BBS, 
and should follow any instructions (like reading the open- 
ing bulletins) religiously. Most beginners' problems come 
from not responding correctly to a prompt — the solution is 
to read the instructions carefully. TPUG 



TPUG magazine page 47 



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page 48 TPUG magazine 



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Mostefcord and VISA customers, please odd 3% ""^ k 



TPUG magazine page 49 



STAR TREK VI 



Dave Neale 

Toronto, OnL 

Welcome to Star Fleet Academy. For those of you who have 
attemptedtoplay the version of Star Trek VI on the February 
(C)T6 disk and have been left somewhat baffled by it, then 
hopefully this will help you graduate to true Captain status. 

The original game of Star Trek is almost as old as theseries it's 
based on. Who first created and developed it has been lost in 
the annals of time. This version for the C-64 is based on that 
original copy. 

Beforewe begin, please read theStarTrek Instructions found 
on the disk. 

The objective of the game is to prevent the Klingon Empire 
from staging a successful invasion of the United Federation 
Territory. You are given a certain Stardate time limit to 
complete this task. As the game begins the Enterprise will 
be put into any one of 81 quadrants. It's your job to scan 
each of these quadrants by guiding the Enterprise through 
the galaxy, locating and destroying the hidden Klingons. 

The Enterprise is equipped with several devices or func- 
tions to aid in completing its task. A list of these can be 
displayed by inputting an invalid command; e.g. hitting 
the space bar. To activate a particular device, type the 
number associated with it. Some devices will require fur- 
ther inputs for proper operation. In order, they are: 

(1) Set Course: This will ask for the direction to move the 
Enterprise. If for example you wish to move up and to the 
right then the course is 2.0 or just a 2. Note that decimal 
values may or may not be used ; any integer or real numbers 
between 1.0 and 8.99 is correct. 

After the course is in, the next data is the Warp Factor (WF). 
This is really a distance question. A quadrant is 1 WF long 
and 1 WF high. To position the Enterprise in the next 
quadrant in exactly its location in the present quadrant, a 
WF of 1.0 would be used. The maximum WF is 8.0, which 
will move the Enterprise across the Galactic Sector. 

(4) Phasers: The amount of power to be fired by the phasers 
has to be input. Remember that the phasers are like a beam 
of light that fades out the farther it has to travel. So not all of 
the power used will get to the Klingon. Also, if there are 
more than one Klingons, then the power is divided equally 
to each Klingon. This device cannot be actuated without a 
Klingon present in the quadrant. The amount of power 
available is the total power not applied to the shields at that 
time. 

(5) Photon Torpedo: This will ask for a course for the 
torpedo to be fired. Its setup is exactly like Set Course 
described above. Just experimenting with this can help you 
to understand how it works. 

(6) Shield Control: This device raises or lowers shield power 
depending on the value input by you. Without shields the 
Enterprise will be destroyed on the first hit by a Klingon or 



Spacemine. When you call on this device, you will be told 
the total energy the Enterprise has and you must decide 
how much to apply to the shields. More on this later. 

(8) Library Computer: With the Enterprise comes a bank of 
very technical computers (C-64's), all tied into the library 
computer. The Targeting and Docking Computers are two 
examples. There is a separate menu of the operations of this 
device which can be seen by first calling on the computer 
and then hitting any invalid command. 

The other devices not mentioned require no inputting and 
are straightforward. These include (2) Short Range Scan 
(SRS), (3) Long Range Scan (LRS), (7) Damage Control and 

(9) Tractor Beam. 

The best way to learn how all these devices act and interact 
with each other is to start a game and watch what happens as 
you play. Lets run through a game together and hopefully 
you'll pick up several tips. 

Assuming the game is going and the Enterprise is showing 
on the SRS, a few operations are required to get under way. 
First we'll raise the Shields to a value that will protect us. I 
recommend about 2000 units or 66% of your total power. 
Once that is done, we can survive several hits by Klingons. 
Every game is different, but we'll assume we've started in a 
quadrant with no Klingons in it. 

To find the Klingons, we will have to use the LRS. But first 
let's look at the Library Computer (type 8, then 1). As you 
can see, only one quadrant is uncovered, this is our present 
position (Note: for the definition of what each number 
means, see the Star Trek Instructions). To open up more of 
the galaxy we would call on the LRS (type 3). The box in 
the top left corner shows what is in the nearest quadrants on 
every side of us. Hopefully they will reveal a Klingon or 
two. Now we'll go back and call up the Library Computer 
again. This time a change will be made: more of the galaxy 
has been uncovered and we're in a good position to start our 
maneuvering. 

Because this is new to you, we'll pick out a quadrant that has 
a single Klingon in it. It's time to move the Enterprise. 
Before we do, we'll check to see if anything is in our path 
(stars, starbase, or spacemines — especially spacemines). For 
simplicity, we call up the SRS, type 1 for Set Course and 
input the appropriate direction. Next we input the WF, 
usually 1.0. (actually it's best to try for the centre of the 
quadrant because the farther the Klingon is away from you 
the harder he is to destroy). When that's inputted correctly 
a warning horn will sound the alarm, liOur shields are less 
than 200 units, then we'll get 4 blasts of the horn; otherwise, 
2 blasts will sound. 

When the SRS is printed, we can decide which weapon to 
use. I recommend using photon torpedos whenever possi- 
ble because they take very little power to launch. Power is 
our only protection againt a short and dismal career. If 

continued on next page 



page 50 TPUG magazine 



need be, the correct direction can be obtained by asking the 
library computer (type 8, then 2). We input the direction 
and fire away. 

If everything is going our way we have just destroyed our 
first Klingon. However, it's not always that easy. If he 
survived, he will have fired at us and we may have suffered 
some damage. The amount of damage depends on our 
present shield strength: low damage if shields are high, and 
vice versa. 

There really isn't much else that you need to know about 
how to destroy the Klingons, except if one happens to be in 
a Nebula. The instructions on the disk explain what a Neb- 
ula is and how to deal with it. Just remember that you can't 
see the Klingon until you're parked next to him, and that 
takes a bit of moving around. Because of this, it's best to 
leave the Nebula till you know that the last Klingons must 
be hiding there. 

Let's backtrack a little and say we didn't get the Klingon and 
he did cause some damage to the Enterprise. We can see a 
graphical display of how badly we were hit by calling up 
Damage Control (type 7). 

Each Device can have a positive (green), negative (red), or 
zero (yellow) status, negative being unserviceable. The game 
always starts out with a zero status on all devices and depend- 
ing on what happens, it will go positive or negative. The 
more we move around the smaller the negative status bars 
get. Also when you move, you may encounter random 
damage to any device. 

When we start getting low on power or torpedoes then it's 
time to find a Starbase to refuel and resupply. If one is 
showing on the library computer then we'll go to that quad- 
rant and maneuver the Enterprise alongside the Starbase 
(next to it in any direction will do). If the library computer 
is unserviceable, the screen will clear and we'll have to grab 
a joystick for a manual docking. Use control port 2. 

The Enterprise must be flown into the small docking bay on 
the base. Be careful not to touch the base for any longer thc^i 
2 seconds or we'll be destroyed. The fire button stops the 
movement. When the "DOCKED" flag appears we'll return 



to a normal SRS (if SRS is operational). You can practice 
this again by calling the SRS once more. 

While we're docked, the Starbase Technicians can fix all of 
the unserviceable devices if we select Damage Control. This 
however will cost us some stardates so the Captain must use 
his/her judgement. 

Another feature that makes this version stand out is the 
ability of the Klingons to move from quadrant to quadrant 
as the Enterprise does the same. Klingons guarding a Starbase, 
in a Nebula, or one quadrant in any direction from the 
Enterprise cannot move. Of course the Klingons still hid- 
den won't move out in the open either. This can cause a 
disastrous situation if the Enterprise had low power and 
moved on two Klingons while a third jumped into the same 
quadrant. This is where experience pays off. 

The Enterprise is equipped with a Tractor Beam for pull- 
ing near-dead Klingon battle cruisers alongside. This can 
be activated by typing "9", however the beam can only lock 
onto one Klingon at a time and only pull him in if his power 
levels are low. Of course the Klingon Captain may not want 
tobetractored so he might enable the self destruct sequence. 
Also be careful not to tractor him into a spacemine. This 
feature will later be used to take prisoners for interrogation. 

There is a series of new functions and ideas in the working 
stage, some of which will be active by the time this is printed. 
These will include amongst others: 

(1) Skill Levels 

(2) Diplomatic ships, Spy ships etc. 

(3) Klingons can fire first if you are slow 

(4) Smooth screen scrolling 

(5) Tactical sensors 

(6) Transport (for beaming on other ships) 

The rest of the information can be picked up as you go 
along and I'm sure you will learn from your mistakes as 
does everyone who plays. However if this still doesn't answer 
all your questions, feel free to send me your comments or 
ideas to the address at the start of the game. 

Good luck. Captain! TPUG 




TPUG magazine page 51 



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(downloading) 



page 52 TPUG magazine 



tF 



^ 



FAMILY TREE 

A software package to help you use the 
Commodore 64 or VIC 20 (32K) as a 
dynamic systevi to control data on your 
family tree. 

FEATURES 

— Unlimited Genealogies 

— Fully indexed 

— Easy editing and updating 

— Search functions 

— Family Record sheets 

~4, 5, 6 Generation pedigrees 

— Output to screen or printer 

— Complete manual 

$49.95 CND -$39.95 US 
(Ontario and Michigan residents add sales tax) 

GENEALOGY SOFTWARE 

phone 519-344-3990 



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Whatever y»u have in mind . . . 
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computer screen or your printer. 



FILE DISK #1 programs are all written in 
BASIC that you can hst and study. As your 
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g 



TPUG magazine page 53 



New Additions to the TPUG Library 

(Access to library available to TPUG members only) 

NOTE: Each List-Me File includes the following notation: 

"Copyright ^^=^983 by Toronto PET Users Group Inc." 
"OK to copy but is not to be sold or published for profit" 

The LIBRARY to which a disk/tape belongs is indicated by the library code in brackets. This code appears as the first 

character in the three-character identification code: 

(C) Commodore 64 (P) PET/CBM (V) VIC 20 (S) SuperPET 

If you wish to order disks or tapes from our library, please make sure that the programs you order are compatible with the 
computer you have. 



(V)Fl-FRANCAIS I 

(1 disk/tape) 
LIST-MOI(V)FI.L 
FR.VICABI,8K.V 
FR.VICAB2 8K.V 
FR.VICAB3 8K.V 
FR.VICAB4 8K.V 
FR.VICAB5 8K.V 
FR.RHINO.V 



TURTLE PROTO.V 



FR. FRACTIONS 

FR.EXMULTV 
FRTACH.V 
FR.DEV.LE#.V 
FR.SIMPL.V 



Description breve du logiciel (V)F1. 

Programme educatif pour les enfants. 

Programme educatif pour les enfants. 

Programme educatif pour les enfants. 

Programme educatif pour les enfants. 

Programme educatif pour les enfants. 

Evitez les Rhinoceros et rentrez a 

la maison. 
FR. DEFLECTION. V Envoyez la balle vers le triangle le 

plus rapidement possible. 

Vic vous pose des problemes de 

fractions. 

Problemes de multiplications. 

Programme de lecture rapide. 

Devinez le nombre de I a 501. 

II s'agit de reduire chaque fraction a 

sa plus simple expression. 
FR. 

ORTHOGRAPHE.V Problemes d'orthographe. 
FR.BAL.FAR.V Pouvez-vous amener le ballon a 

destination? 
FR. GRAND PRIX.V Course automobile contre des 

obstacles. 

Problemes de divisions. 

Vous avez un temps limite pour 

accumuler des points. 

C'est la course mathematique contre 

la montre. 

Problemes de divisions. 

Voyage de I'espace. 

Demonstration couleurs-formes. 

Jeu de des contre le VIC, (tres 

difficile!) 

Voyagez dans I'espace sans frapper 

roches et debris. 

Le but du jeu est d'accumuler le plus 

d'argent sans mourir. 



FR. DIVISION. V 
FR.LE SERPENT.V 

FR.MATH-MIN.V 

FR.EXDIV.V 
FR.USS ENTER.V 
FR.SQUIGGLE.V 
FR.NOTONE.V 

FR.VOYAGEUR.V 

FR.AU VOLEUR.V 



(V)T7-MARCH 84 
(1 disk/tape) 

LIST-ME(V)T7.L LIST this file for description of programs 

on (V)T7. 
83 TAX ONT 8K.V Takes you step by step through your 1983 

Tax Form. 
TURTLE BOOT DISK LOAD and RUN this program for Turtle 

Graphics on disk. 
TURTLE BOOT TAPE LOAD and RUN this program for Turtle 

Graphics on tape. 



TL]TT.V 
TL]STAR.V 
LIGHT CYCLES.V 

WORDiMATCH.V 

16K-3K.V 

LOSTBOOT.V 

THE LOST CRAFT 

DEMONS.V 

COLORBOT.V 

COLORBOTMAIN.V 
GOTCHA. V 

CIRCUS. V 

CIRCUS MAIN.V 
VIC PIANO. V 
SHUFFLE.V 
SPEED MATH2.V 
SUBHUNT8K.V 
ETMATH1-5.V 

SLITHER TAPE. BT. 
SLITHER 4 
SLITHER DSKBT.V 
NIGHTMARE PK8K.V 



This is the main part of the Turtle 

Graphics. The full documentation for 

these programs can be found on the 

TPUG B.B.S. To load demos below type 

LOAD, you will be asked for a file name, 

then a device number. (Device number is 

1 for tape, 8 for disk.) 

Demo for Turtle Graphics program 

above. 

Demo for Turtle Graphics program 

above. 

A two player keyboard game with 

machine language and hi-res graphics. 

Avoid the other player and the wall. 

One or two players. Use your memory 

to remember where the words are. 

This program converts the 16K VIC to 

3K memory. 

LOAD and RUN this to load the "LOST 

CRAFT". 

Hi-res joystick and keyboard sound 

game. 

Attack oncoming demons using the 

keyboard. Use the SHIFT, T and U keys. 

LOAD and RUN this; then LOAD and 

RUN "COLORBOT MAIN.V". 

A robot zapum type game. 

Grab the money and run before you get 

eaten. 

LOAD and RUN this; then LOAD and 

RUN "CIRCUS MAIN.V". 

A game with sound and graphics. Pop the 

balloons. Similar to the arcade version. 

Use your VIC as a piano. Has graphics 

and sound. 

Dutch translation. Move pieces to get 

right pattern. 

Test your math skills; but be quick. 

Primary level. 

Kill subs with depth charges before 

they kill you. 

These are a series of math drills testing 

different math skills at a primary school 

level. 

LOAD and RUN this program to load 

"SLITHER 4" on tape. 

Use the joystick to move your snake and 

eat hearts. 

LOAD and RUN this, then LOAD and 

RUN "SLITHER 4" on disk. 

Get through the park with your life. 

This game uses all your skills, (memory, 

math etc.). 



page 54 TPUG magazine 



TORONTO PET USERS GROUP 

1912A Avenue Rd., Ste. 1 
Toronto, Ontario 

M5M 4A1 

ORDER FORM 

Name Membership # 

Street Address Telephone . . . . 

City/Town/P.O 

Province/State Postal/ZIP Code 



The prices indicated include postage and handling as well as Ontario Provincial Sales Tax (if applicable). 
Make cheque or money order payable to: TPUG. 

DISKS 

To order dub disks by mail, send $10.00 for each 4040/2031/1540/1541 disk (4040 format), and $12,00 for each 8050/8250 disk (8050 
format). We do honour purchase orders from school boards. 

If you wish to order the total library to date for a specific computer (PET, SuperPET, VIC 20 or Commodore 64), contact the club office to 
find out how many disks there are currently. The cost is S8.00 per disk (4040 format) and $10.00 per disk (8050 format). 

These disks are for use with a computer and a disk drive. 

Please send me the following: 

3 Letter/No. 4040 or 8050 

Code Description Format Price 



Total .00 



TAPES 

To order VIC 20 or Commodore 64 library tapes, send $6.00 for each tape. If you wish to order the total library to date for the 
VIC 20 or Commodore 64, contact the club office to find out how many tapes there are currently. The cost is S5.00 per tape. 

To order PET/CBM or Commodore Educational Softwware tapes, check first in the library listing. Each entry indicates the number of 
tapes required directly below the title of the listing. Send $6.00 per tape required (i.e. either $6.00 for 1 tape, or $12.00 for 
2 tapes). 

These tapes are for use with a computer and a datasette. 

If for a PET computer- what model -Basic- 1.0 ( ), 2.0 ( ), 4.0 ( )? 

3 Letter/No. 

Code Description 1 or 2 tapes Price 



Total .00 



TPUG magazine page 55 



GET MORE FROM 
YOUR COMMODORE 



Tom Shevlin, Sysop 

Toronto, Onl. 

As the new Sysop, let me welcome you to the somewhat new 
TPUG BBS. The TPUG Board of Directors recently decided 
to make the BBS a much more integral part of the club 
operations. Since this coincided with the decision of Tony 
Prijately from Electronics 2001, your faithful Sysop for 
several years, to let someone else have some of the fun, I was 
asked to take over the duties, and gladly accepted. 

First, the good news. The club has acquired a dedicated 
telephone line for the BBS, so it is now a 24-hour service. It 
is intended that the main purpose of the BBS will be to 
address the needs of TPUG members, so a variety of new 
services will be available. Business with the club office, 
including comments, membership fees, and disc/tape orders 
can be done by addressing private messages to 'TPUG 
OFFICE', and including a Visa number where appropriate 
(and membership number, of course). 

Letters to the editor of TPUG Magazine, and article submis- 
sions can be made by sending messages to TPUG MAGA- 
ZINE' and uploading WordPro files. Submissions to the 
TPUG Library are especially encouraged, via the upload 
section. In the past, contributors sent in a disk with their 
program, which was returned with a library disk of their 
choice copied on it. Now programs submitted via the BBS, 
if accepted into the library, will earn the contributor the 
disk of his choice without having to send his own disk in. 
Programs should be original, especially not typed in from 
Compute! or Compute Gazette, who get touchy about that, 
and accompanied by a message to Sysop explaining that 
they are library submissions, and giving your choice of 
TPUG disk if accepted. 

I have noticed that the number of messages requesting help 
with Commodore BASIC and machine language has gone 
down greatly, and I think this might reflect natural inhibi- 
tions against appearing 'dumb' amongst experts. I am there- 
fore encouraging all 'dumb' questions to be directed to 
'QUESTION BOX', and I will forward them anonymously 
to ALL, in hopes that the world-reknowned Toronto Com- 
modore community will have a prompt answer for you. It 
will help me greatly if you do not sign such messages at the 
end. 

There is another bit of news that might not be so pleasant. 
As this BBS will continue to be able to serve only one user at 
a time, the club Executive has decided to end the user 
download feature, as the time required to use it greatly cuts 
down on the number of possible users. When this BBS first 
went up, there were almost no others, but similar download 
features can now be found locally on the PSI, CFTR, RTC, 
NORTEC and other BBSs. One especially fine service is 
offered for a small fee of SIO per year by the Bradley 
Brothers BBS (BBBBS, at 416-487-5833), who have a major 
portion of the TPUG library, including virtually all the 
C-64 disks, available for download on their 7.5 megabyte 
hard disc storage. As a partial compensation, I will attempt 
to give listings of all the latest TPUG discs, including some 
before their release at meetings. 



New! 

HANDS-ON BASIC FOR THE COMMODORE 64 

byPeckham $29.95 

This book provides a series of guided activities, 
using the hands-on method. A proven, effective 
way to leam BASIC programming with a minimum 
of supervision. 

YOUR COMMODORE 64 

byHeilbom $19.95 

This fully illustrated teaching guide includes 
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COMMODORE 64 FUN & GAMES 

by Jeffries, Fisher and Sawyer $15.95 
A collection of 35 games and puzzles including 
Boswain, Mad, Godzilla, Yahtzee and Zap — 
guaranteed to provide hours of enjoyment for any 
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page 56 TPUG magazine 



The following is a slightly abridged ver- 
sion of the documentation that was avail- 
able at the TPUG Commodore 64 meeting. 
The only items which have been excluded 
are the start and finish addresses in both 
hexidecimal and decimal. If you need these, 
they are included in the complete version 
from the TPUG office for $1.00. 

ABBREVIATIONS USED 
IN THIS LIST-ME 

BL - Block Length 
PL — Program Length 
FT — File Type 
CL — Classification 



(C)T7 



LIST-ME (C)T7.L 

Load as follows: LOAD "LIST-ME (C)T7.L']8 
FT: PRG, CL: LIST-ME 

This file contains one-line documentation 
of the programs on (C)T7. 

C-64 BOOK SORT.C 

Loadasfollows: LOAD "C-64 BOOK S0RTC'[8 
BL: 37, FT: PRG, CL: BUSINESS 

Keep track of all your books. Detailed 
instructions are included in the program. 

REL-SEQCONV.Z 

Load as follows: LOAD "RFL-SFQ C0NV.Z'\8 
BL: 10, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This utility program will convert EELa- 
tive files to SEQuential files or SEQuential 
files to RELative files, 

BETTER FILEZ 

Load as follows: LOAD "BETTER FILE.Z'\8 
BL: 44, FT: PRG, CL: BUSINESS 

BETTER FILE will allow you to enter data 
and then manipulate it in various ways. 
For example, you can save and retrieve 
information from disk, sort your informa- 
tion on any of the eight fields, print out 
your information and more. . . 

SPIKE BOOT.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ''SPIKE B00TC'\8 
BL: 1, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

This program LOADs "SPIKE.D" into your 
Commdore 64 and RUNs it. 

SPIKE.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this program. 

BL: 18, FT: PRG, CL: DATA 

Guide your man around the grid in search 
of a prize. As your sonar gets shorter, you 



are getting closer to the prize. Once you 
think you have found the prize, surround 
the square that you think it is in and you 
will move on and get a bonus for the squares 
you have left untouched. Beware of the 
spikes! They travel around the grid at ran- 
dom and will kill you if you run into them. 

Use joystick port #2 to control your man. 
Good luck. . . 

THIRSTY NELLAN.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ^THIRSTY NEL- 

LAN.C'\8 

BL: 56, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

This is an adventure game in which you 
must find Nellan the cat some cool milk to 
drink. This game, as with most adventure 
games, requires you to input 2 words when 
you want to move or pick something up. 

For example, if you wanted to TAKE a 
MAP, you enter 'TAKE MAP'. As long as 
there is a map there, and nothing obstructs 
you from getting it (such as an angry cat) 
you will be allowed to TAKE the MAP. 
Once you have the MAP, it is possible to 
CONSULT ihe MAP. 

If you want to see what you are carrying, 
type 'INVENTORY'. If you want to move, 
type 'GO' followed by the direction ('N'orth, 
'S'outh, 'E'ast, or 'West) that you want to 
go. If you get into trouble, ask for 'HELP'. 
Good luck. . . 

PETMAN.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ''PETMAN.C'\8 
BL: 22, FT: PRG, CL:(GAME 

In this game you must eat the little dots in 
the maze as fast as you can. There are four 
guards on duty and their job is to stop you 
from eating the little dots. If one catches 
you, you die a slow, painful death. 

You can turn the tables on the guards by 
eating an energizer (*). Then, for ten sec- 
onds the guards are weakened and you can 
eat them. You get a big bonus for every 
guard you eat. 

Use joystick port #2 to control your man. 

SWERVE.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ''SWERVE.C'\8 
BL: 18, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

The object of this game is to maneuver 
your car around the track without collid- 
ing with the computer-controlled car. You 
get ten points for running over an addition 
sign and twenty-two points for running over 
a diamond. When you clear the track, you 
start over, but it gets harder. 
Use either joystick port or-if you don't have 
a joystick- f5 moves you up, f7 moves you 
down, cursor down moves you left, and 
cursor right moves you right. Good luck. . . 



ATLANTIS ADVN.C 

Load as follows: LOAD 'A TLANTIS ADVN 

C",8 

BL: 53, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

This is an adventure game in which you 
have just found the lost City of Atlantis at 
the bottom of the Tasman Sea. Your mis- 
sion is to explore the ruins and bring back 
any valubles you find. 

This game is like most other adventure 
games. If you want to give commands you 
must use 2 words. For example if you wanted 
to GET a COMB, you enter 'GET COMB'. 
As long as there is a COMB there, and 
nothing obstructs you from getting it (such 
as an angry octopus) you will be allowed to 
GET the COMB. 

If you want to see what you are carrying, 
type INVENTORY. If you want to move, 
type GO followed by the direction ('N'orth, 
'S'outh, 'E'ast, or 'West) that you want to 
go. If you want to see your rating, type 
'SCORE'. If you get into trouble, ask for 
'HELP'. Good luck. . . 

WESTWARD HO!.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ''WESTWARD H0!.C\8 
BL: 28, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

Gold has been discovered in the west! You 
have decided to go to find your fortune. 
After selling off what you could, you have 
raised S700. You must spend between S200 
and $300 for a team of oxen. Naturally the 
more you pay, the better oxen you get. 

Now it is time to buy other supplies such as 
food, ammunition, clothing, and other 
supplies. You should keep a bit of money 
to buy things along the way. Anything can, 
and usually does, go wrong. 

Periodically you will be asked if you want 
to hunt. If you say YES, you will be given 
three shots at a buffalo. What you have to 
do is estimate which screen line the beast is 
on and enter that number. Your shot will 
be fired. If you miss, the buffalo moves and 
you get to try again. 

I would tell you more but I always seemed 
to get killed very early on in the game. 
Good luck. . . 

OTHELLO.C 

Load as follows: LOAD 'VTHELL0.C",8 
BL: 23, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

Othello is played on an 8 * 8 grid with rows 
1 to 8 and columns A to H. The object of 
the game is to capture as many of your 
opponent's pieces as possible. To capture 
pieces, place your piece so that a horizontal, 
vertical, or diagonal line of your oppo- 
nents pieces is contained by yours. 

continued overleaf 



TPUG magazine page 57 



You can play against another person or 
your Commodore 64. Have fun. . . 

SCRAMBLE.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ''SCRAMBLE.C'\8 
BL: 8, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

In this game you must avoid and shoot all 
of the scrambling obstacles. If you hit any 
of the scramblers or the ground you will 
die. 

To move up use fl. SHIFT fires. Good 
luck. . . 

HANG MATH.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ''HANG MATKC'\8 
BL:12, rrPRG, CL: EDUCATIONAL GAME 

Solve the multiplication problems by gnjess- 
ing the digits that go where the asterisks 
are. You.get eleven chances before you get 
your neck stretched. Good luck. . . 

CASTLE ADVN.C 

Load asfollows: LOAD "CASTLE ADVN.C",8 
BL: 52, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

This is an adventure game in which your 
mission is to explore your surroundings 
and collect any valuables you find. 

This game is like most other adventure 
games. If you want to give commands you 
must use 2 words. For example if you wanted 
to GET a LANCE, you enter 'GET LANCE'. 
As long as there is a LANCE there, and 
nothing obstructs you from getting it (such 
as a black knight) you will be allowed to 
GET the LANCE. 

If you want to see what you are carrying, 
type 'IN\'ENTORY'. If you want to move, 
type 'GO' followed by the direction ('N'orth, 
'S'outh, 'E'ast, or 'West) that you want to 
go. If you want to see your rating, type 
'SCORE'. If you get into trouble, ask for 
'HELP'. Good luck. . . 

SNOOPY. C 

Load asfollows: LOAD "SN00PY.C'\8 
BL:19, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATIONAL GAME 

You are a World War I flying ace out to get 
the Red Baron. To hit him, enter the posi- 
tive or negative distance between you and 
the Red Baron. If you enter it correctly 
your shot will hit him. If not, he will hit 
you. 

If you hit the Red Baron five times, he will 
crash and you will win. However, if he hits 
your Sopwith Camel five times, you will 
crash and your mission will be a failure. 
Good luck, sir. . . 

LEMONADE STAND.C 

Load as follows: LOAD ^LEMONADE 

STAND.C']8 

BL: 21, IT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TIONAL GAME 



You've decided to run a lemonade stand 
for ten Saturdays this summer in order to 
make some money. But you soon find that 
runningastand costs money. Your job is to 
make as much profit as you can. 

Your loving family agrees to lend you SIO 
in order to get you started. But remember 
that at theendof the summer you will have 
to repay the loan. 

Factors to keep in mind: A lower price will 
sell more, but you will make less per cup. 
On hot days, you will sell more and be able 
to charge more. Good luck. . . 

MUSIC LESSON.C 

Load asfollows: LOAD "MUSIC LESS0N.C':8 
BL: 43, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TION 

Andy the Android will teach you the lines 
and spaces in music. I would say more but 
Andy is very good at his job so I won't want 
to get the union upset. Have fun. . . 

MUSIC LESSON.C 

Loadas follows: LOAD ''MUSIC LESS0N.C'\8 
BL: 43, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATION 

Andy the Android will teach you the lines 
and spaces in music. I would say more but 
Andy is very good at his job so I won't want 
to get the union upset. Have fun. . . 

TICTACARITH.C 

Load as follows: LOAD "TICT AC ARITH.C\8 
BL:26, IT: PRG, CL: EDUCATIONAL GAME 

The object of the game is to get three boxes 
in a row (horizontally, vertically, or diag- 
onally). You win a box by solving the prob- 
lem in the box. If you solve it incorrectly, 
then your opponent gets a chance to win 
that box. 

The math in this game should be suited to 
grade 2 or 3 students. Good luck. . . 

FUNCT MACHINE.C 

Load asfollows: LOAD TUNCTMA CHINF 

C\8 

BL: 26, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TION 

You have just discovered a strange machine. 
It takes numbers, chews them up, and spits 
them out. The numbers that come out are 
very different from the numbers that go in. 
But the machine is not random. Your mis- 
sion is to figure out the rule so that you can 
predict what the machine will do. 

You win when you make 3 correct predic- 
tions in a row. Then the machine will start 
again with a different rule. Good luck. . . 

SPEED READ.C 

Load asfollows: LOAD "SPEED READ.C'\8 
BL: 9, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TION 

This program tests your reading speed and 



comprehension. Although some of the sen- 
tences are a bit strange, the object is to 
recognise them in the shortest possible time. 
Good luck. . . 

LIFEEXPECTAN.C 

Loadas follows: LOAD 'LJFE EXPECT AN.C'\8 
BL: 18, FT: PRG, CL: MISC 

After you answer some questions about 
yourself, your Commodore 64 will predict 
how many years you will live. Some of the 
questions are personal so be sure you alone 
with your computer when you do this test. 

THEVALLEY.C 

Load as follows: LOAD 'THE VALLEY.C",8 
BL: 57, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

Find treasure and battle monsters in the 
valley. As your character gains experience, 
he becomes stronger and more capable. 

Similiar to Dungeons and Dragons. Use 
joystick port #2 to move. Beware. . . 



(C)T8 



AUTO BOOT.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''AUTO B00TC",8 
BL: 8, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will show you the directory 
of a disk and then LOAD and RUN any 
program from that disk by entering the 
letter that corresponds to the program name. 

DISKTIMER.Z 

LOAD asfollows: LOAD "DISK TIMER.Z",8 
BL: 4, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will check to see if your disk 
drive is operating at the right speed. 

SQUEEZER. Z 

LOAD asfollows: LOAD "SQUEEZER.Z",8 
BL:23, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program takes BASIC programs and 
'squeezes' them by removing all REMarks 
and spaces. Then it packs the lines together 
and writes the new program back to disk. A 
handy program to have. 

ATOM HANDBALL.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD 'ATOM HAND- 
BALL. C'\8 
BL: 15, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

A very good game similiar in theme to 
BREAKOUT. Control your paddle with a 
joystick plugged into control port #2. Press 
the FIRE button to serve. Good luck. . . 

continued on next page 



page 58 TPUG magazine 



PENT INST.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD -'PENT INST.C'\8 
BL: 6, FT: PRG, CL: INSTRUCTIONS 

Thisprogram willgiveyou instructionson 
how to play PENTOMINOS.C 

PENTOMINOS.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "PENT0MIN0SC'\8 
BL:6,FT:PRG, CL: CAME 

This program will help you when you are 
playing PENTOMINOS. 

SPIRAL.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''SPIRAL.C",8 
BL: 4, FT: PRO, CL: DEMO 

This little demo will create a spiral pattern. 
You can change it by playing with the 
keyboard. Give the function keys a try. 
Enjoy. . . 

LINCOLNSHIRE.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''LINCOLN- 
SHIRE.C '[8 
BL: 9, FT: PRO, CL: MUSIC SOUND 

More music from Jim Butterfield. 

RANDOM MUSIC.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''RANDOM 

MUSIC.C'\8 

BL: 9, FT: PRO, CL: MUSIC pUND 

This program will output rather pleasant 
random music and print the notes and their 
duration on your monitor. 

KALEIDOSCOPE-C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "KALEIDO- 

SC0PE.C':8 

BL: 4, FT: PRO, CL: DEMO 

Generates a symmetrical pattern in colour 
on your monitor. 

64 MEM CHART.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "64 MEM CHART 

C\8 

BL: 10, FT: PRO, CL: MISC 

This little program will graphically show 
you what is where inside your Commodore 
64. 

LIFE2.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "LIFE 2.C'\8 
BL: 13, FT: PRG, CL: MISC 

This program will simulate life in a com- 
munity of cells. Be sure and read the instruc- 
tions within the program or you will get 
lost. 

ETCH A SKETCH.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD 'ETCH A SKETCH 

C'\8 

BL: 5, FT: PRO, CL: MISC 



Draw pictures in high resolution on your 
Commodore 64. W moves you UP and to 
the LEFT, E moves you UP, R moves you 
UP and to the RIGHT, S moves you LEFT, 
D moves you RIGHT, Z moves you DOWN 
and to the LEFT, X moves you DOWN, 
and C moves you DOWN and to the 
RIGHT. Have fun. . . 

TRON.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "TR0N.C'\8 
BL: 5, FT: PRO, CL: CAME 

This is a two player game in which you try 
to colour more dots than your opponent. 
Player 1 should use a joystick plugged into 
control port #1 and player 2 should use a 
joystick plugged into control port #2. Good 
luck. . . 

DEFLECTION 2.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "DEFLECTION 2. C']8 
BE: 9, FT: PRC, CL: CAME 

Your objective is to deflect tlieball into tlie 
trap. Use the M and N to deflect the ball. 
Be swift, you only have 30 seconds! Good 
luck. . . 

3 OF A KIND.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "3 OF A KIND.C'\8 
BL: 12, FT: PRC, CL: GAME 

In this program your Commodore 64 will 
give you a list of 9 words, from which you 
and your 64 pick alternately. 

The object is to get three words which con- 
tain the same letter. For example, if you 
get mast, skip, and slow you would win 
since each word has an 's' in it. Good luck. . . 

BIGTIME.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "BIG TIME.C",8 
BL: 9, FT: PRC, CL: MISC 

After you input what time it is, your64 will 
display the time in big characters. 

HIRES PATTERN.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "HIRES PATTERN. 

C']8 

BL: 2, FT: PRC, CL: DEMO 

This program will plot a pattern on the 
hires screen of your Commodore 64. 

SMOOTH SCROLL.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SMOOTH SCR OLE 

C'\8 

BE: 2, FT: PRC, CL: DEMO 

This program will show you an example of 
smooth scrolling. 

SMOOTH SCROLL2.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SMOOTH SCROLL 

2.C'\8 

BE: 2, FT: PRC, CL: DEMO 



This program will show you an example of 
smooth scrolling. 

M/L MUSIC.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "M L MUSICC",8 
BE: 2, FT: PRG, CL: MUSIC SOUND 

This program will play either The Enter- 
tainer or Bach's Invention #8. 

PLAY-D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this fie. 
BE: 5, FT: PRC, CL: DA TA FILE 

This file contains DATA that is LOADed 
andusedby M/LMl SIC.C. 

ENTER.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 
BE: 12, FT: PRG, CL: DATA FILE 

This file contains DATA that can be 
LOADed and used by M/L MUSIC.C. 

INVEN8.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 
BE: 8, FT: PRC, CL: DATA FILE 

This file contains DATA that can be 
LOADed and used by M/L MUSIC.C 

SHEET MUSIC.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SHEET MUSIC.C",8 
BL: 2, FT: PRC, CL: MUSIC SOUND 

This program plays 2 songs and displays 
the notes on your monitor along with the 
music. 

SHEET DATA.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 
BL: 15, FT: PRG, CL: DATA FILE 

This program contains data LOADed and 
used by SHEET MUSIC.C. 

LOTTERY NUMS.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "LOTTERY NUMS. 

C",8 

BL: 5, FT: PRC, CL: MISC 

This program generates a series of random 
numbers which may be used to get a ran- 
dom number for a lottery ticket. It is pres- 
ently set up to pick numbers for Lotto 6/49 
but it can be easily customized by editing 
lines 100-120. 

TYPE SETTER. C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "TYPE SETTER.C'\8 
BL: 11, FT: PRC, CL: UTILITY 

If you have a Gemini or an Epson printer 
you can change the style of type it prints 
from a menu. If you want to modify this 
program to work on other printers edit the 
CHRS codes according to your printer 
manual. 



continued overleaf 



TPUC magazine page 59 



DISKETTE MOD.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD '^DISKETTE MOD. 

€",8 

BL: 11, FT: PRG, Cl: UTILITY 

This program is to be used to patch up 
smashed sectors on diskettes by reconstruct- 
ing each byte manually. If you do not know 
what you are doingor if you are not careful 
you can ruin your diskette. 

BARRICADE.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "BARRICADE.C",8 
BL: 7, FT: PRO, CL: GAME 

You have five balls. You must stop them 
from moving by blocking them. Use any 
key to create a block right behind the ball 
and try and trap it. Good luck. . . 

MASTERMIND.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''MASTERMINDC'IS 
BL: 13, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

The object of this game is to guess the 
colours the 64 has chosen and the six posi- 
tions in which they go. There are 6 colours 
to choose from. Red, cyan, purple, green, 
blue, and yellow. You have ten guesses. 
Good luck. . . 

MASTERWORD.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD 'MASTERWORD. 

C'\8 

BL: 12, FT: PR G, CL: ED UCA TIONAL GA ME 

In this program you must try to guess the 
mystery 5 letter word. You must guess ONLY 
real 5 letter words. You will be told the 
number of letters in your guess that are in 
the secret word. HINT: The trick is to vary 
slightly from one guess to the next. Have 
fun. . . 

SHUFFLE.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SHUFFLE.C'\8 
BL: 9, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

In this game you must try and re-arrange 
the numbers on the grid so they are in 
'proper' order. You can move a number 
from its position to another only if the next 
space is empty. Good luck. . . 

SLITHER.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SLITHER.C",8 
BL: 15, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

In this game you must guide your snake 
around and get the hearts. If you hit the 
walls, the blocks, or yourself you die. Con- 
trol your snake with a joystick plugged 
into control port #2. 

SLITHER 4.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''SLITHER 4.C",8 
BL: 15, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

Use your joystick to guide your snakes 



through the garden looking for treats. But 
don't touch the poison mushrooms, the gar- 
den walls, or your snake's body or you will 
die. Be sure and plug your joystick into 
control port #1. 

SLITHER DUEL.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SLITHER DUEL 

C'\8 

BL: 15, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

The object of this game is not run into any 
occupied space or wall. The player that 
does so first loses. You can play alone, play 
with a friend, or you can let the computer 
play itself. Good luck. . . 

NAMES UTILITY.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''NAMES UTILITY. 

C'\8 

BL: 8, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TION 

This program allows initial creation of a 
names file that is to be used later with 
GRADEBOOK.C. 

HOMEWORK. C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "H0MEW0RL(.C'\8 
BL: 17, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATION 

A yes/no entry routine used with GRADE- 
BOOK.C. Was a paper submitted? 

ATTENDANCE.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "ATTENDANCRC':8 
BL: 17, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATION 

A yes/noentry routine used with GRADE- 
BOOK.C. Was the student present? 

REPORTER.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "REPORTER.C ",8 
BL: 11, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATION 

This program reads the data files of the 
HOMEWORK and ATTENDANCE prc^ 
grams and prepares a summary. 

GRADEBOOK.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "GRADEBOOK.C',8 
BL: 28, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TION 

This program will allow you to enter, 
inspect, list, and calculate the grades and 
more. 

INFO.PM.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 4912 BYTES, BL: 20, FT: SEQ, CL: PAP^ 

ERMATEFILE 

This is a file that contains information on 
GRADEBOOK and all of the files and/or 
programs that go with it. It was created 
using the word processor 'PAPERMATE'. 
To access this file you must own 'PAPER- 
MATE.' 

NAM.BACKUP.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 



FL: 745 BYTES, BL: 3, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 
FILE 

This isabackupof the NAMES file used by 
NAMES UTILITY.C. 

HWK.BACKUP.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 511 BYTES, BL: 3, FT: SEQ CL: DATA 

FILE 

This is a backup of the HOMEWORK file 
used by HOMEWORK. C. 

ATT.BACKUP.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 628 BYTES, BL: 3, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 

FILE 

This is a backup of the ATTENDANCE 
file used by ATTENDANCE.C. 

GRD.BACKUP.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 372 BYTES, BL: 2, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 

FILE 

This is a backup of the GRADEBOOK file 
used by GRADEBOOK.C. 

NCOURSE.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 745 BYTES, BL: 3, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 

FILE 

A typical names file. 

HCOURSE.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 511 BYTES, BL: 3, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 

FILE 

A typical homework file. 

ACOURSE.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 628 BYTES, BL: 3, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 

FILE 

A typical attendance file. 

GCOURSE.D 

Do NOT attempt to LOAD this file. 

FL: 372 BYTES, BL: 2, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA 

FILE 

A typical gradebook file. 

64-PET INST.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "64-PET INST.C ",8 
BL: 2, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will tell you how you can 
LOAD programs SAVEd on your Commo- 
dore 64 into a PET with BASIC 4.0. 

I525COMMANDS.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "1525 COMMANDS. 

a\8 

BL: 6, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

continued on next page 



page 60 TPUG magazine 



This program will PRINT a list of CHRS 
codes that you can use to take full advan- 
tage of your 1525 printer. 

LIST-ME LOTT.L 

LOAD as folloivs: LOAD ''LIST-MEL0TTr\8 
BL: 3, FT: PRO, CL: LIST-ME 

This file contains an explanation of what 
LOTTERY. L is supposed to do. 

LOTTERY. C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''L0TTERY.C'\8 
BL:8,FTPRG, CL: MISC 

See how good your chances of winning the 
big prize really are. 

LIST-ME 6/49.L 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "LIST-ME 6 49.U\8 
BL: 2, FT: PRG, CL: LIST-ME 

This file contains iii struct ions for LOTTO 

6/49.C. 

LOTTO 6/49.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD ''LOTTO 6 49£'\8 
BL: 2, FT: PRG, CL: MISC 

This program will pick Lotto 6/49 num- 
bers for you. Good luck. . . 

MUL MASTER. C 

LOADas follows: LOAD ''MULMASTER.C']8 
BL: JO, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCA TION 

This program will test your skill in the 
multiplication tables up to 12 * 12. It is a 
multiple choice quiz. Select your choice by 
pressing the appropriate function key. 

You will have 30 seconds to get as many 
correct answers as you can. Your score for 
each correct answer will depend on the 
degree of difficulty. Good luck. . . 

PROGRAM INFOX 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "PROGRAM INFO. 

C'\8 

BL: 6, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will display the start and 
finish address of a program and how many 
bytes long it is. 

CHANGE TITLE.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD XHANCE TITLE 

C\8 

BL: 6, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will change the name of your 
disk without re-formatting the disk. 

TITLE PAGE.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "TITLE PA GE.C^\8 
BL: 9, FT: PRG, CL: BUSINESS HOME 
APPLICATIONS 

Print a title page for a report or an assign- 
ment. 



HEX DECBINX 

LOAF) as follows: LOAD "HEX DEC BLMC^\8 
BL: n, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will convert Hexadecimal 
to Decimal, Decimal to Hexadecimal, Hex- 
adecimal to Binary, Binary to Hexadecimal, 
Decimal to Binary or Binary to Decimal. 

DISK PRINTER. C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "DISK PRINTER.C\8 
BL: 7, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will PRINT the dij-ectories 
of your disks. 

SPELL.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "SPELL.C ^',8 
BL: 16, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATION 

This program can be used to test a student's 
ability to decipher clues to find the correct 
word and his/her ability to spell the word. 

An example clue might be: You're sitting 
in front of one now. Rhymes with 'looter'. 
The answer would be 'COMPUTER'. 

A sample file is provided so you'll have a 
better idea of how to make your own. Good 
luck. . . 

SPELL1.1/15.D 

LOAD this file from wiihm SPELL.C by 

answering 1 when asked for the MONTH and 

15 when asked for the DAY. 

FL: 181, BL: 1, FT: SEQ, CL: DATA FILE 

This file contains sample information that 
you can use as a guide in making your own 
DATA files to go with SPELL. c/ 

TYPETUTOR.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "TYPE TUT0R.C'\8 
BL: 18, FT: PRG, CL: EDUCATION 



Practice your keyboard manipulation skills. 
There are 16 levels. Level 1 covers only a 
few keys while level 16 tests you on the 
entire keyboard. 

BREAKOUT I.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "BREAK OUT IC^\8 
BL: 14, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

A game similiar in theme to BREAKOL T. 
Control your paddle with a joystick plugged 
into control port #2. Good luck. . . 

BREAK OUT2.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD-BREAK OUT2C'\8 
BL: 14, FT: PRG, CL: GAME 

A game similiar in theme to BREAKOUT. 
To move your paddle leftpress'l', to move 
it right press '3', and to stop it press '2'. 
Good luck. . . 



COIL DESIGN.Z 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "COIL DESIGN.Z'\8 
BL: 22, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program is to be used to design single 
layer solenoids on standard resistor forms 
or on a form having a diameter of your 
choosing. 

You decide the size of the coil form, the 
inductive reactance, and the wire size. The 
computer will do the rest! 

LARACTERS DEMOC 

LOAD as follows: LOAD 'TARACTERS 

DEM0.C",8 

BL: 14, FT: PRG, CL: MISC 

See all of the charactei^s in your Commo- 
dore 64 displayed expanded on your moni- 
tor. 

UNICOPY INST.Z 

LOAD as follows: LOAD "UNICOPY INSTZ'\8 
BL: 9, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will tell you how to use 
UNICOPY. C. Be sure and read the infor- 
mation in this file before you attempt to 
use it. Good luck. . . 

UNICOPY.C 

LOAD as follows: LOAD 'VNIC0PY.C'\8 
BL: 8, FT: PRG, CL: UTILITY 

This program will copy any selection of 
PROGRAM or SEQUENTU\L files from 
one diskette to either another diskette or to 
a tape. TPUC 




TPUG magazine page 61 



For Recreation 
In Education . . . 

Games designed by teachers and 

classroom tested 

VIC 20 

MULTIPLY - ranges within 2 x 2 to 9 x 9. 

ADDITION - Uses same range and format as 

MULTIPLY. 
TIC-TAC-FRAC - game to reduce fractions. 

STATES - drills youngsters through graphic display of 

states. 
RULER - teaches use of ruler in fractions of inches. 

*14.95 each on cassette. ^39i95 all five on single disk. 
COMMODORE 64™ 

MULTIPLY - ranges from 2 x 2 to multidigit numbers. 
Disc only ^39.95 i^^BI 

VfSA 

MasterCard and Visa accepted; give card '^^^^^"^^H 
number and expiration date. Schools may I^J^^i 
send purchase orders. tIHI^! 

T^^TRADEMARK OF COMMODORE ELECTRONICS LTD 

ELECTRONIC 
SCHOOLHOUSE 

THE ABNEL COMPANY 

RO. Box 397, Grand Junction. CO 81502 

303/245-3997 
FOR 

ORDERS In Colorado call 1-800-874-3426 
ONLY; U.S. and Can. call 1-800-874-5280 




©1983 



in 


'lciL^AA^e.a>t 


f^" 




/ \ \ 




v > 




(L 


j^^^fr-X 


STOCK HELPER" 

Commodore 64 ' 

Stock HELPER is a tool to maintain a history of stock 
prices and market indicators on diskette, to display 
charts, and to calculate moving averages. Stock 
HELPER was designed and written by a "weekend 
investor" for other weekend investors. 

Stock HELPER is available on diskette for: 
^^^ $30.00 ($37.50 Canadian) ^ _ 

^^^r (Minnesota residents please add 6% sales tax) j^^i-F-. 

plus $1.25 shipping (1.55 Canadian) 

(M)agreeable software, inc. 

5925 Magnolia Lane • Plymouth, MN 55442 
(612)559-1108 

(M)agreeable and HELPER are tradennarks of (M)agreeable software, inc. 
Comnnodore 64 Is a tradennark of Connmodore Electronics Ltd. 



Keep detailed 
records of all tax 
deductions, bank 
payments, monthly 
charses, individual 
item expenses, and 
check transactions with 

Home 

Finance 

Manager 

A user-friendly budset 
prosram. Mini-financial 
manaser stores more than 
200 transactions per month. 
For the Commodore 64. $39.95 





TfV 

Cardinal Software 



Virginia Micro Systems, 13646 Jeff Davis Hwy., Woodbridge, Virginia 22191 
Phone (703) 491-6502 Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon-Sat Ask for our free catalog 



FOR THE COMMODORE 64: 

tm 
The Banner Machine For the Commodore 64 (3 extra fonts 

available). • For the VIC-20 with 24K memory (2 extra fonts avail- 
able). • Use on any Gemini or Epson MX with Graftrax or the FX 
and RX printers. Also Commodore 1 525E and Banana with the C-64. 
• Menu-driven program operates like a word processor. • Makes 
signs up to 13" tall by any length. • Makes borders of widths up 
to Vi". • 8 sizes of letters from ^A" to 8" high. • Proportional 
spacing; Automatic centering; Right and left justifying. • S49.95 
Tape or Disk (Specify computer equipment) 

File Organizer Creates Data Base storage system. For mailing lists, 
club rosters, check books, etc. S29.95 

CTRL-64 Permits listing of C-64 programs on non-Commodore 
printers. Lists control symbols in readable form. Tape or disk S24.95 

Microbroker Exciting, realistic and educational stock market 
simulation. S34.95 Tape or Disk 

Preschool Educational Programs ABC Fun; 123 Fun; and Ginger 
the Cat with: Addition and Subtraction, Number Hunt, and Letter 
Hunt. All 5 programs have bright color, music, and action. Each 
SI 4.95 

Formulator A scientific calculator for tasks which require repeti- 
tive arithmetic computations. Save formulas and numeric expres- 
sions. S39.95 

Grade Organizer Teachers— store grades for 6 classes, up to 40 
students each, 680 grades per student. Print interim and final 
reports, class rosters, and more! Disk S39.95 

MUPOS Create a file of up to 9 basic programs from keyboard/ 
tape/disk and run each program selectively. Programs can be 
appended together into one. Renumber BASIC lines. Note pad, and 
more. Tape or disk S22.95 

Commodore 64 and VIC-20 arc registered trademarks of Commodore Electronics Ltd. 



page 62 TPUG magazine 



Take advantage of Canadian $$$$$ prices. 




EDIT ASM It 

- DESIGNEDTO HELP YOU CREATE' 
AND MODIFY 6502 Assembly Lan- 
guage Programs on the Commodore 
64 Computer. 



It? 

ONSCREEN HELPSYSTEMtoassist J^j? 
you in using all commands available. . . v^f 
add. assemble, calculate. delete, direc- '^ 
tory. disk, edit. find. help, insert, list .JsJ^NN^- 
load, merge, new. plist, quit, and save. ■ 

i36 9o 



THrBANKERthe 



checkbookrecon 



^iiation program; 






^e5ofANY5lZE. 



■WORDS* CALL 

;", Powerful household finance — 
Business system 

— eliminate inconvenient files, confus- 
ing tables and tedious calculations 

-store all your data on WORDS & 
CALCS spreadsheet 

-WORDS &CALCS will do your work 
for you in organizing, displaying, 
storing, printing and performing 
calculations 

S42 9Sd«5k 



UL 



A^'^'t!^'S?eime"ornrn*>c«ioos^^ 



/^ccessort^^ 



■Sov/hYnottTO^ 



Selective 
Doro. 



Storage <^ 



r Files- 



•^•'^j:!!^-^'^""'^ 



fy 



cd^ 



/" 



r 



Files c 
FormorredUnes. 



Why not cash in on the good programs that 
'you have written? We are actively seeking 
SOFTWARE AUTHORS. We are paying above 
average royalties for all programs that we 
accept. Submit your copy on tape or disc, for 
VIC-20orC-64 with detailed operating instruc- 
tions. If you wish program returned, please 
enclose sufficient return postage. 



Write for our FREE Catalogue. 




Suite 210, 5950 Cote des Neiges, Montreal, Quebec H3S 1 Z6 



Dealer Inquiries tnvited 



SCS PAYROLL C-64 



' Easy to use. No special training required 

► SCS Payrolls have been used by Canadians since 1980 
» Calculates k Prints Gross Pay, Overtime and Net Pay 

► Prints Cheques or Pay Statements -User Choice 

• Prints Employee Files with Cumulative Totals' 

► Monthly Report Gives Journal Entry and Receiver General Remittance Data 

• Prints T4s at Year End 

• Uses Formulas Recommended by Revenue Canada 

• Complete Audit Trail 

• Up to 50 Employees on 1 Data Disk 



Skeena Computer Services Ltd. 
Box 437 KITIMAT BC 
V8C2R9 (604) 632-4212 



$139. 



Dealer Inquiries Welcome 




SCS VICPAY 

Calculates &: Displays 
Gross Pay, Deductions 

and Net Pay 
$24.95 



A dvertisers ' Index 

Page 

B.B.B.B.S 52 

Beaver Software Systems 26 

Bent Computer Associates 25 

Book Company 16 

Brantford Educational Services 49 

Business Systems Sc Conversions 45 

Canadian Software Source 53 

Creative Computer Systems 23 

Compu-Simple Simon 25 

Comspec 36 

Electronics 2001 , 12&16 

Electronic School House 62 

Electric Software Company 26 

Friendly Software 53 

Geneology Software 52 

Grand River Software 16 

High Res 26 

Hunter Nichols 2 

Infomag 36 

King Microware 63 

(M)agreeable Software 62 

McGraw-Hill Ryerson 46 

Microcomputer Solutions 30 

Milne's Computer Control Systems 35 

New Leaf 49 

Nibble Notch 15 

Ph.D Associates 17 

Phoenix Software 25 

Precision IBC 

PRO-LINE IFC 

PUG Software 52 

Richvale Telecommunications BC 

Systems Management Associates (SMA) 13&39 

Sectore's 30 

page 64 TPUG magcuine 



Skeena Computer Services Ltd 64 

Skyles Electric Works 1 

Such-A-Deal 48 

Transierra Technology 30 

Toronto PET Users' Group 15 

Ultra-byte 46 

Umbrella Software Inc 16 

Virginia Micro Systems 62 

Wycor Business Systems 16 

classified 



This space is limited to TPUG member wanted or for sale 
items only. 

Space cost is 25 cents per word. IVQ DEALER ADS ArCEPTED 

* Zenith Green Display Monitor for Sale. $95.00. Call Martin — (416) 
663-5698 after six. 

*For Sale: Commodore CBM 8096 with 8050 Dual Disk 
Drive, 8023P tractor printer with stand. Silicon Office, Calc 
Result. 6 months old. Best offer over $4,000. Days 433-4200, 
evenings 579-7720 (ask for Dave) 

* Wanted: Commodore 8032 computer, 2031, 2040, 4040 or 8050 
disk drive. Call (416) 366-2130 

Commodore PET 32K, Dual Disk Drive, TX80 Printer k 
lots of business, educational and games software $2,200 or 
offer. (416)446-1035 

Wanted -4040 or 2031 Disk Drive with cord for PET 2001. Call 
Russell (801)628-0433 or (801)673-4457 eves. 



I 




Developing a mind 
for the Future. ^^ 





Colo^80s59.95cc^. 



Produces 80 Columns With Color' 

Needs No Extra Hardware 

Use With Terminal Programs 

Uses No Basic Memory in the 64 

Develop Your Own Programs 



SUPER BASIC S46.95CDN. 

■ Gives you 3 different versions of Commodore 

Basic Programing Language Version d PLUS! 

A Built in Machine Language Monitor' 
- DiSk & File Maintenance Commands 

Data Handling Commands 

Graphics Plus Basic 

Compatible with Commmodore's "B" Series & 

Much Much More! 

RECREATE PROGRAM $39.95cdn. 

RTC's Answers to Program Recreation 
Converts Printer's File to SCRIPT 64's Files 

SUPER COPY $39.95coN. . 

Super Fast Disk Copies on a 1 541 '*~' 

Copy Entire Disk in 7 Minutes or Less 
Copy Selected Files 
Complete Pattern Matching 
Full Prompts 

BASIC AID s49.95CDN. 

Your Aid to Writing Programs 

Allows Scrolling Through Programs 

Adds 33 more Commands to the Basic Language 

Has Find, Change, Merge. Move Commands 

Convert Hex. Binary and Decimal Numbers and More' 



SCRIPT 64 & SCRATCH PAD 64$129.oocon. 



Script 64: 
Word Processor in French and English 
80 Columns 
Global Search and Replace 
User Created Dictionary 
Spelling Check 
Scratch Pad 64 
The Database/Mail List in One! 
Merges with Script 64 Word Processor 
Phnt out Labels, Envelopes, Mail List & More! 
Suitable with both Single and Dual Disk Drives 
Fully C64 Link Compatible 



C64 LINK 

The Smart 64 



Give These Expanded Capabilities 
to Your 64 and VIC 20 "^ 

• The ability to transfer data from any type of device to another 
(IEEE, Serial, Parallel) 

• BASIC 4.0 which allows you to run more PET BASIC programs 
and gives you extended disk and I/O commands. 

' The ability to have several 64s on line together - sharing com- 
mon IEEE devices such as disks or piinters with Spooling 
Capability. 

• Built-in machine language monitor. 

• A built-in terminal or modem program which allows the system 
to communicate through a modem to many bulletin board 
systems and other computer mainframes. 

• Compalability with CP/M. 

Contact your local Commodore dealer or RTC. 
Payments by VISA, MASTERCARD or BANK TRANSFER. 
Mail orders also by certified cheque, etc. 





Spooling 

to 
Printer 



Compatibility 
Board*" 



^ic^v4Ue'7€Uc^*HHuaUc€Uio4U 



10610 Bayvlew Avenue (Bayview Plaza) Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada L4C 3N8 (416)884-4165